Free Pitch Deck Template: 14 Slides and What Investors Check (2026)

You need a deck by Friday, so you search for an investor pitch deck template. Canva alone had 11,855 pitch deck templates in October 2026. They look great. Open one, though, and you get a nice slide that says "Problem" over some filler text. Nothing tells you what to write there, or what the investor reading it will check. That's the part that decides whether you get a meeting. So we built a different kind of template: 14 slides, each with what to write and what investors look for. Below you'll find the free PowerPoint file, the slide order, worked examples and a checklist for the day you hit send.

A pitch deck template is a ready-made set of slides you fill in to pitch investors. A good one puts the slides in the order investors expect, from the problem to the ask. It also tells you what to write on each slide and what the reader will check. A design-only template gives you the look, but not the story.

What slides should a pitch deck have?

Most investor decks cover the same ground. After the cover come the problem, your solution, why now, the market, the product and traction. Next come the business model, competition, go-to-market, the team, financials and the ask. Add a closing slide with your vision and contact details, and that's 14 pitch deck slides.

Think of the deck as four short chapters. First, the opportunity: the problem, your solution, why now and the market. Then the proof: the product, traction and how you make money. Then why you'll win: competition, go-to-market and the team. Last comes the deal: the numbers, the ask and where this goes next.

The order isn't fixed, though. If one slide is your strongest card, move it up. Say you hit $80K in monthly revenue six months after launch. That belongs on slide 3, not slide 7. Our guide on what to include in a pitch deck explains this rule. Our pitch deck structure playbook shows how the order shifts by stage.

Pitch deck template: free PowerPoint download

A good pitch deck template gives you one slide for each question an investor asks, in a sensible order. Each slide says what to put there and what the investor will check. Ours has 14 slides in PowerPoint, plus a checklist. Fill in the brackets, write each title as a full sentence and delete the guidance before you send it.

Here's the same investor pitch deck template as a table. Where we have a full guide to a slide, the slide name links to it.

Want the pitch deck template in Google Slides? Upload the file to Drive, open it and choose Open with Google Slides. Keynote opens it too. The design is plain on purpose. In PowerPoint, change the theme colours and fonts once, under Design and then Variants, and every slide follows.

Prefer the classic Sequoia layout? Our Sequoia pitch deck template guide takes it slide by slide. For real decks that raised money, see our VC pitch deck examples.

What do investors check in a pitch deck?

Investors want quick answers to six questions. Why you? How big can this get? Why now? What's the proof? How do you make money? What do you need? The team comes first. In a large survey of VCs, 95% of firms rated the team as important, more than any other factor.

Your deck has to answer them fast, because it's one of many. The average firm in that study screens about 200 companies a year and invests in 4. Reading time is short too. In Waveup DocSend data, successful decks get about 2.5 minutes of reading and unsuccessful ones about 30 seconds. So each slide gets a few seconds. It has to make its point in the title.

The same VCs credit the team, more than the business, for their wins and their losses. Y Combinator's seed deck guide puts it bluntly: "Nobody cares about your advisors." So give each founder one line and one fact that proves they fit this problem.

How do you fill in a pitch deck template?

Start with the one-liner on the cover. Then write every slide title as a full sentence, so the titles alone tell your story. Fill the proof slides with real, dated numbers. In our work on 1,000+ decks since 2014, the fastest fix is usually the titles. Then cut every line that doesn't help an investor decide.

1. Write the one-liner first — what you do and for whom, in words a stranger gets. If you can't, the slides won't fix it.
2. Turn every title into a takeaway — then read the titles on their own. They should tell the whole story.
3. Date every number — "1,200 users" says little. "1,200 paying users in September 2026" is proof.
4. Lead with your strongest slide — move traction or the team up if that's your best card.
5. Keep one idea per slide — if a slide needs you in the room to explain it, split it or cut it.
6. Match the deck to your model — revenue, burn and runway must agree everywhere.
7. Run the checklist, then send a PDF — it's the last slide of the template. Delete it, and every guidance panel, before you send.

Example: titles that make a point

Here's what that looks like for a fictional dental software startup. Its product refills cancelled appointments from a waiting list.

Example: sizing the market from the bottom up

Investors trust maths they can follow, so start small and specific. Say there are about 9,000 independent dental clinics in your first three countries. Each would pay $3,500 a year. That makes a starting market of about $31.5M. For most VCs that's too small on its own. So show where you go next: larger dental groups, then other clinic types, each with its own count and price. A big industry figure can come last, with its source and year.

Example: working out the ask

The ask should buy a milestone, but the months matter too. In mid-2025, the median gap between a seed round and a Series A was a little over 20 months (Carta). Say your team burns $150K a month. Twenty months of that is $3M. Add a few months of buffer and you're asking for about $3.5M. On the slide, that becomes one line, like the last title in the table above. Then split the money by what it pays for, and leave the valuation off.

A real example: a $10M Series A deck

Order and focus can change the result. Waveup prepared the investor materials for a plant-based energy drink company's $10M Series A. Its first deck drew no interest. It opened with ten slides on the product and a generic industry market size. The new deck opened with the opportunity instead: the segments the brand sold into, and why the moment was right. With it, the company booked 40+ investor meetings and got 3 term sheets. See the case.

How many slides should a pitch deck have?

For a seed round, about 14. Waveup's internal data puts the average seed deck at 14 slides and the average Series A deck at 18. Guy Kawasaki's famous rule says 10, but he wrote it for a live 20-minute pitch. A deck you email has to work without you, so a few more slides are fine.

Series A decks run longer because there's more to prove. You have real numbers now, and investors want to see how they hold up. Rounds are bigger too, as Carta's Q2 2026 medians below show. Here's what usually changes between the two rounds.

Whatever the stage, cut before you add. If two slides make the same point, merge them. If a slide only matters in a meeting, keep it in an appendix and send it later.

Which pitch deck template should you use?

Pick by the job. Design galleries like Canva, Pitch and PowerPoint give you a look. Investor outlines like Sequoia's and Y Combinator's give you an order. Few of them tell you what investors check on each slide. If you're raising money, get the story right first. Then pick the design.

Galleries are fine for the look. The trouble starts when the layout decides the story. Decide what each slide has to prove first. Then pick the design, or have someone build it for you.

That's the work our pitch deck consulting team does: the story, the slides and the numbers behind them. An investor deck starts from $6,000 and takes about 2 weeks. Already have the content? Pitch deck design on its own starts from $100 per slide. Want to compare options first? Our guide to the best presentation design agencies covers them, us included.

How do you know your deck is ready to send?

Your deck is ready when a stranger can read it in under three minutes and explain your business back to you. Every title should make a point, and every number should have a date. Traction should sit in the first half. The ask needs an amount, milestones and a timeline. If any check fails, fix that first.

The last slide of the template has a fuller version: 12 checks to tick off before you hit send. Then send the PDF through a tracked link, and you'll see which slides investors read and which they skip.