Founders who published their decks, term sheets and numbers for everyone.
Most fundraising happens behind closed doors, which is exactly why the founders in this collection matter. They published the documents everyone else keeps secret. Joel Gascoigne announced Buffer's $3.5M round with the valuation and term sheet attached, while the round was in progress. Mathilde Collin released Front's Series A deck, then the B, then the C, so you can watch a company's story mature across three rounds of the same product. Rand Fishkin open-sourced SparkToro's funding documents so other founders could reuse the structure. Gagan Biyani published a brutally honest accounting of Udemy's 200-plus rejections and twelve wasted months.
Reading a hundred articles about pitch decks teaches you less than reading three real decks that closed real rounds. These artifacts are the primary sources of fundraising: actual valuations, actual dilution, actual slides in the order investors saw them. Study them the way you would study game film. And when you build your own deck, the VCMatch pitch-deck library has dozens more where these came from.
Buffer publishes every detail of its $3.5M Series A: the valuation, the actual term sheet, investor list, ARR ($4.6M), and the unusual structure that let founders and early employees take secondary money. A landmark in fundraising transparency.
Collin publishes the actual deck Front used to raise its $10M Series A, slide by slide, with commentary on what worked. Later viewed over 2 million times and followed by her Series B, C, and D decks.
After his bruising VC experience at Moz, Fishkin raised $1.3M from 35 angels under a novel structure allowing profit-sharing distributions instead of requiring a huge exit, and open-sourced the legal docs so others could copy it.
The actual deck behind Front's $66M Sequoia-led Series B, published with commentary on how the narrative evolved from the Series A and what growth evidence carried the round.
Gagan Biyani walks through every mistake three first-time founders made raising Udemy's seed: 200+ rejections and 12 months of wasted fundraising before barely pulling through. Each mistake is framed as a lesson for new founders.
Front CEO Mathilde Collin discusses her famously fast Series A and B processes, including the transparent metrics emails she sent investors and how she created competitive dynamics.
Sequoia's actual 2005 YouTube Series A memo, made public through the Viacom lawsuit: written when YouTube was two months old with no CEO and no business plan, it shows how a top firm underwrote a raw, risky deal.
Collin announces Front's $65M Series D (Salesforce Ventures, Battery) at the bottom of the 2022 downturn, linking her written reflections. She is the rare founder who has published her actual Series A, B, and C decks publicly, with commentary; her Series B was famously 11 investor pitches over five days yielding 10 offers.
The third installment in Collin's published-deck series: the actual deck behind Front's $59M Series C, showing how a growth-stage narrative differs from the A and B stories she'd already published.
Allred announces Lambda School's $14M GV-led Series A with a two-word nod to Elon Musk's infamous 'funding secured' tweet. An artifact of the ISA-education hype cycle whose later unraveling gives it a cautionary second reading.