Founded in 2017, Fluency is an adtech company that provides a unified operating system to manage digital advertising campaigns across platforms such as Meta, Google, TikTok, and other platforms.
Ad agencies traditionally manage a separate interface for each advertising platform they run paid campaigns on. They manually upload and resize creative assets, manage budgets, set audience parameters, maintain brand consistency, and pull reporting and campaign insights on each platform. Fluency centralizes and automates execution across these platforms and helps brands to manage advertising at unprecedented speed and scale.
“Over the past three decades, digital advertising has reached a tipping point of complexity, defined by increasingly fragmented systems and technologies, an abundance of data, error-prone manual management, and costly internal tooling,” a company statement read.
Fluency currently powers nearly $3B in annual media spend and 250,000+ monthly campaigns. The platform is used by leading agencies and brands, including Fortune 500 organizations. These companies run campaigns for over 50,000 local businesses by automating the most time-consuming campaign execution processes.
“Our clients are accountable for delivering multichannel advertising, often across hundreds of brands and thousands of locations. It’s impossible for humans alone to manage the level of complexity this requires, no less scale it efficiently,” said Mike Lane, CEO of Fluency.
The company announced that it has raised a $40 million Series A investment round, led and fully funded by Integrity Growth Partners.
“There’s no lack of technology or innovation in the adtech space, but Fluency’s OS has achieved something that other companies have only attempted. Rather than taking a ‘swiss army knife’ approach to bringing together common functionality into a single platform, they’ve elegantly woven together entire multi-step processes to streamline operations that have simply become untenable,” said Ryan Anderson, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at IGP.
The company said it will use the Series A proceeds to enhance automation and AI capabilities. Currently, Fluency mostly uses Amazon’s Bedrock generative AI models, as well as Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. The funding will help Fluency to enhance its agentic AI models that can autonomously oversee marketers’ digital ad campaigns, eventually swapping out ad creatives or copy with better-performing versions automatically.
Check out the 23-slide pitch deck Fluency used to secure the $40 million Series A funding round.
What were the slides in the Fluency pitch deck?
Browse the exact example slides from the pitch deck that Fluency used to raise $40M from Integrity Growth Partners.
1. Mission Statement Slide
Like many things related to business and self-development, ‘Mission Statement’ has become a buzzword these days. In reality, it’s a fundamental purpose for a company to navigate complexity and leads through uncertainty. According to Deloitte, purpose-driven companies capture more market share and grow 3x faster than their competitors. They also report 30% higher levels of innovation and 49% high levels of workforce retention. Additionally, having a stated mission helps you build reputation and increase the chances of success in the market because it provides a benchmark by which to measure your progress, creates accountability, and provides clear direction to the team.
So, how do you actually create a mission statement that doesn’t sound like a generic poster in a breakroom?
Here are the main characteristics of a mission statement:
- A mission statement is about focus and the pursuit of a specific goal. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, once said, “If you have three priorities, you have no priorities.”
- Your mission statement should be achieved or measured against concrete actions and initiatives.
- Finally, the mission statement shouldn’t be something easily achieved. Rather, it should be something that an organization will have to work for.
Fluency’s mission statement hit checked all the boxes: it is focused, achievable, and not easy to accomplish. The mission statement slide makes a solid first impression by using a centralized layout, creating a clear focal point and adding a textured background that’s not overpowering. However, the slide makes some crucial mistakes. First of all, the wall of text below the heading is too dense to scan quickly in a pitch deck context. There also appears to be a spacing error in “artificialintelligenceto” which can signal a lack of polish and attention to detail. Overall, the slide is solid but a few improvements could’ve turned this from a “good try” into a high-impact slide.
2. Market Size Slide
The market size slide is an important part of any pitch deck because investors are looking for big potential outcomes. If the market looks too small, they won’t bother diving deeper. Investors also use the market size as a signal; does this startup have billion-dollar potential?
A well-structured market size slide helps investors compare startups. They see hundreds of decks, and they need a common language to evaluate opportunities. Venture capitalists also don’t invest alone. They have to justify investments to their own LPs, and a big market size helps them sell the investment internally.
The common way to introduce the market size in pitch decks is through the classic market-sizing frameworks (i.e. TAM (Total Addressable Market), SAM (Serviceable Available Market), and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market)). Fluency’s deck is no exception— the market size slide uses the typical TAM/SOM/SAM circle to break down the numbers.
On the design side, the structured layout separates the graphics from text and the punchy headline signals the growing market and Fluency’s market share. However, like other slides in the pitch deck, a dense wall of text makes quick comprehension nearly impossible. The sheer volume of information is competing with the visual and the slide fails to make a good impact.
3. Notable Achievements Slide
When a business sells a product to a customer, it’s selling a solution to the customer’s problem. Dyson doesn’t just sell vacuum cleaners; it helps people save time cleaning their homes. HubSpot doesn’t sell CRM software; it helps sales teams close deals faster. People don’t buy products; they buy solutions to their problems, needs, or desires.
However, when founders are selling to VCs, they often forget this simple truth and focus on their product and its features. The VCs main concerns are to a) not lose money, and b) not damage their reputation by backing a failing startup. At the same time, they don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity and high returns.
Once founders understand this, they can frame the pitch in a way that would convince investors that they aren’t just another struggling startup, but a high-quality, high-return opportunity. There are many ways to show this. For example, founders can show VCs how they’ve adapted to market changes, managed your rate, and built a resilient team. In the Fluency deck, the founders lean on notable awards and key achievements to establish credibility and validate their value proposition for investors.
The slide’s design is very simple and easy to scan. Unlike many other slides in this pitch deck, there’s no dense text. The strong contrast improves readability against the dark background, while bolded keywords draw attention to the most persuasive proof points. Overall, the slide paints a picture of a company with a proven track record that is positioned as a safe and winning bet for the future.
How to create your own pitch deck like Fluency:
We hope you learned something from the Fluency pitch deck, and that you are able to use these insights for your own business. If you’d like to, you can bookmark it at bestpitchdeck.com/Fluency.
Although it probably goes without saying that having a successful business (outside just their pitch deck) was integral to their success, the perfect pitch deck is critical for any startup to ensure your vision is portrayed properly. That’s where crafting the perfect pitch deck comes essential:
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