FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire intentionally left many of the numbers out of his companies pitch deck when it went out to raise its latest round of funding.simply click here to claim your deal and get access to all exclusive Business Insider PRIME content.Like most founders, he used a pitch deck to solicit investments, but he approached preparing his presentation in some unusual ways.
When companies of that maturity level go out seeking funding, the thinking is typically that their presentations need to be chalk full of numbers — their key performance indicators, or KPIs, such as their customer acquisition costs and their number of monthly active users, and their financial figures, such as their revenue and gross profit.
"You and I can go through [the] deck right now ... and I can spit this thing out for you, but you have to hear me pitch it," said Whitmire, FloQast's cofounder and CEO. "And I think that's really important, because if you put too much information in here, an investor might read it and just not even want to talk to you.
Whitmire's earlier investors weren't sure about his strategy, but it worked. Last month, FloQast announced it had secured $40 million in Series C financing in a round let by Norwest Ventures. The round pegged its valuation at $250 million, up from $135 million two years earlier, according to PitchBook.