Keane Angle has built his career around pitching business ideas to major corporations and VCs around the world, and now he's looking to pay it forward to a group of entrepreneurs who are underrepresented in the startup arena: women.
In 2021, just 2% of US venture capital investment went to all-female startups, the lowest rate since 2013, Angle points out. Via his company, Story Pitch Decks, Angle has created Uplift, a pro-bono pitch-deck program aimed at helping socially and environmentally focused startups with female founders get a world-class pitch deck.
Applications are due by Aug. 1 and then Angle will award a selected startup with a complimentary pitch deck, including content creation, research, strategy, writing and design. Angle said the pitch-deck project will take place the weeks of Aug. 22-29 and will be completed by Sept. 1.
The program is open but has criteria — including the founding team be made up of majority women, the company's mission is socially or environmentally focused. Additionally, the company must be raising a pre-seed, seed, or Series-A round, must be financially under-resourced and must have a healthy work culture and ways of working.
Angle said he wanted to raise awareness about the gender gap in funding to women-led teams.
"Story hopes to make some noise and do our part to try and tip the scales. In the coming years, we will be expanding the program in a continued effort to support women in tech and female entrepreneurship," he said. "The stats are just ridiculous. Coming from the corporate world, gender diversity is drilled into your head. You learn about the pay gap and leadership gap between genders and how you should be thinking about hiring and promoting your team members. But I still couldn't help but ask, Why aren't there more women founders?”
Angle, who started building pitch decks for startups in 2017, said a quarter of his clients are women, which aligns with the industry average. That's a big difference between the 2% of VC funding that went to all-female teams last year.
Since being founded in 2020, Angle said Story Pitch Decks has helped raise over $130 million for the startups with which he's worked. A fairly recent transplant to Rhode Island, Angle and his wife recently moved to North Kingstown with their bulldog.
"Our decks raise at a rate that is 40x higher than the industry average as well," Angle said. "We know what we're doing, and we're donating our services to one majority female-founding startup team. We're also implementing discounts for all-women startup teams and teams that even have just one female founder.
"We hope to give one startup a heck of a good chance at successfully raising a few million," he added.
Angle said he's excited to be able to answer the question "do you give any discounts?" with "yes — if you have at least one woman on your team."
"More often than not, the clients we work with don't have any women on their team and hopefully, that simple answer will do our part to raise awareness of the gender gap one founder at a time," he said.
To apply for consideration, please visit http://stry.pro/upliftapply.
