A founder of Juniper Networks and a co-creator of Apple’s Mac operating system used this hand-written pitch deck to raise $200 million from SoftBank for their new data center startup

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• On Thursday Fungible, a data center infrastructure startup, announced $200 million in Series C funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund.
• The round also included participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Mayfield, Redline Capital, and Walden Riverwood Ventures. 
• The company has raised $300 million since it was founded in 2015 by two Silicon Valley veterans: Juniper Networks founder and former CEO Pradeep Sindhu and former Apple engineering executive Bertrand Serlet.
• Sindhu told Business Insider that he disliked the constraints of a traditional pitch deck, and chose to hand-write his presentation on a tablet. 

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Pradeep Sindhu wasn’t trying to stand out when he started pitching his new data center infrastructure startup Fungible in 2015, but his slide deck quickly caught the eyes of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors.

Instead of putting together polished slides in PowerPoint or Keynote, Sindhu opted instead to draw them out on a tablet before presenting to potential investors. 

"The fact that my slides are hand drawn became a theme," Sindhu told Business Insider. "It’s not that I wanted to stand out, but it’s just how I like to work. I don’t like PowerPoint because it constraints you. Being able to draw by hand allows me to be much more expressive."

Sindhu’s strategy seems to have paid off. 

On Thursday, Fungible announced $200 million in Series C funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund. Since 2015, Sindhu and his cofounder Bertrand Serlet have raised a total of $300 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Mayfield, Redline Capital, and Walden Riverwood Ventures. 

Read More: Here’s how this founder convinced Silicon Valley heavyweights Paul Graham and Peter Thiel to invest $5.8 million in his startup — without using a pitch deck

"When you had 50 plus meetings with investors they tend to get blurred in your mind," Sindhu said. "One of the striking things I remember is hearing ‘Oh boy, you’re trying to do something big’."

Sindhu also founded Juniper Networks and together with Serlet, a former engineering executive at Apple responsible for helping create the Mac operating system, came to the conclusion that existing processors could be used to make data centers more efficient as more applications rely on increasingly complex math.

The end goal, Sindhu explained, is to increase the efficiency of edge servers – that is, the servers that are physically closest to where the user is actually running their applications — which are increasingly called on to handle complex artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks. 

Here’s the hand-written deck that landed these Silicon Valley veterans $300 million in funding from some of the biggest enterprise investors.

Fungible

Fungible

Fungible

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

See Also:

• Here’s the pitch deck a German software startup used to raise $10 million to move to San Francisco and take on Oracle
• Qualcomm Ventures is hosting its first-ever pitch event for startups with female founders, with a $500,000 prize on the line
• Larry Ellison explains why he’s cautiously optimistic that Oracle’s new cloud database will succeed, even though it doesn’t have many customers yet

SEE ALSO: Manufacturing startup Carbon raises $260 million to bring 3D printing to everything from running shoes to autonomous car sensors

Source: Business Insider – mhernbroth@businessinsider.com (Megan Hernbroth)