Date
February - March 2024
Project
Investor Pitch Deck
Client
Abhyaz
Duration
2 months
Crafting a Fundraise-Ready Story for a Two-Sided Marketplace
Client Overview
Abhyaz is a digital-first marketplace connecting SMBs with student interns and early professionals, enabling remote internships and jobs so talent can work without migrating away from their hometowns.
About Project
Abhyaz approached Umanshi with a 70-page draft deck and a clear outcome: fundraise and onboard ecosystem partners. The challenge was to distil complexity, surface the true proposition and present it in a way investors could grasp quickly without losing the social depth of the model.
Challenge
Making Sense of Founder Thinking
The challenge wasn’t lack of clarity, but abundance of it.
The founder, Sashi carried a zillion interconnected ideas across impact, product, partnerships and scale. Our task was to listen deeply, ask the right questions and convert that thinking into a coherent, fundraise-ready narrative.
Dual-Sided Complexity
Abhyaz was solving two problems at once.
SMBs struggling with digital adoption and students seeking local, meaningful work. Most decks fail when they try to explain both together.
Investor-Ready Clarity
The intent was strong but numbers needed discipline.
The story had to translate into metrics, scale logic and revenue pathways investors expect—without overclaiming or drowning in detail.
Our Strategy
Finding the Needle
We started by asking uncomfortable questions.
Multiple working sessions with founder Sashi Sairaman helped isolate what truly mattered: Abhyaz is not a job portal or course platform, but a cooperative-driven digital marketplace solving employability and MSME digitisation together.
Two Stories, One Missing Link
We restructured the deck around storytelling.
Using the characters Vijay (an MSME owner) and Kavita (a rural student), the deck visually showed how two separate struggles converge through Abhyaz—clearly illustrated in the zipper-style narrative opening the deck.
Breaking the design norms
Comic-style illustrations were used to reduce cognitive load, humanise the problem and add emotion. While risky for a pitch deck, this choice made the story memorable and differentiated—something most founders would reject, but Sashi backed fully.
Testimonial
They Became Part of Our Team
Umanshi didn’t work like an external agency, they became part of my team. Tamanna understood the founder’s vision instinctively and asked the right questions that helped fine-tune the pitch. The team captured the tone perfectly, balancing clarity with humour and creativity. The process was smooth, required very few iterations and everything was delivered on time. It genuinely felt like working with a co-founder rather than a vendor.
Sashi Sairaman
Business Mentor, Abhyaz
Built for Business Outcomes
Investor Comprehension
Converted a 70-page dump into a sharp, story-led pitch
Clear Proposition
Positioned Abhyaz as a marketplace, not a training platform.
Credible Scale Logic
Structured growth milestones across 1, 3 and 5 years & backed with data/ reason-to-believe across places
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