What is a use of funds slide?

The ask, explained

The use of funds slide exists because a bare number invites the wrong question. An investor who reads raising four million wants to know whether that figure came from a plan or from what similar companies raised. The slide answers by showing the split, the time it covers and the result at the end. Aaron Harris's seed deck template for Y Combinator puts it in one line: tell the investor how much money you need and what it gets you, and if you can lay out where you will be inside a year, that is powerful. Geoff Ralston's seed guide adds that a fundraising slide can include a short product roadmap, six quarters at most, showing what an investment buys.

How much to raise, and why the milestone matters

Ralston's guide suggests raising enough to reach the next fundable milestone, usually 12 to 18 months later, and offers a simple way to size it: decide how many months of operation to fund, estimate monthly cost, and multiply. Its example uses a rule of thumb of about fifteen thousand dollars a month all in per engineer, so five engineers for eighteen months comes to about 1.35 million dollars. The milestone is the point of the whole slide. A round sized to reach a specific revenue, customer count or regulatory approval lets the next investor see what the money proved, which is the evidence the following raise will rest on.

What a good slide shows

The amount and the runway in months, large. Four to six categories, each with an amount, a percentage and a short line on what it buys; people understand hires and launches better than department names. The milestone the round reaches, stated as a number and a date. Percentages that add to one hundred and amounts that add to the raise. A table often reads more clearly than a pie or donut, because it has room for the purpose column, though a donut with a short legend works when the categories are few and the split is the story.

Common mistakes

The first is categories so broad they mean nothing, such as growth and operations. The second is numbers that do not add up to the raise, which suggests the slide was edited without the model. The third is a split that contradicts the rest of the deck, for example a sales led plan that allocates almost nothing to sales. The fourth is no runway or milestone, leaving the investor to guess what success looks like. The fifth is a large unexplained line for marketing, which reads as spending to buy growth rather than to test a channel. The sixth is ignoring money already in the bank, so runway looks shorter or longer than it is.

Use of funds outside venture rounds

Crowdfunding campaigns, grant applications and nonprofit appeals all have a version of this slide, and the audience is often less expert, so specifics carry even more weight. A crowdfunding investor cannot ask a follow up question, so each line needs its reason written out. A donor wants to know what one unit of their gift achieves. The principle is the same everywhere: show the plan, not the pot.

Where it shows up in the product

Investment is its own slide role here, with templates built for the ask and its use of funds, holding an amount, a runway line and a breakdown. The crowdfunding example on this site uses one with six lines that total exactly to the raise, each with the reason it exists. A table slot can grow to 20 rows and 8 columns, and a donut is one of the 10 chart kinds for a visual split. The generator fills in amounts when a brief has none, so give it figures that already reconcile and check the total afterwards. The editable PowerPoint export rebuilds tables and charts as native objects, which helps when a finance lead wants to check the arithmetic.

Questions people ask