AI is an interesting space to be in, especially with a few major players on the market. The name of the game for Fifth Dimension is to find strong points of differentiation from the general purpose AIs on the market and a strong go-to-market story that sets them apart. Does Fifth Dimension have those things? Let’s find out!
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Slides in this deck
Fifth Dimension AI used a tight 13-slide deck to raise its round. The deck is almost as pitched, but the team did remove some of the customer logos and customer quotes, as it prefers to keep those close to their vest. Here are the slides:
- Cover slide
- Problem slide part 1
- Problem slide part 2
- Solution slide
- Product slide
- Customer workflow slide
- Traction slide
- Moat slide
- Product vision slide
- Market size slide
- Adjacent markets slide
- Team slide
- Ask and use of funds slide
Three things to love
AI is a chaotic free-for-all right now, especially when it comes to the fundraising cycles. Data from PitchBook shows that fundraising for AI startups is outpacing every other company vertical at the moment. Still, you do have to stand out somehow. Here are some of the highlights from Fifth Dimension’s deck:
Bringing the problem to life
I love that the company used quotes to help give the problem some three-dimensionality:
The very brief snippets of stories are representative of admin and analytical work across dozens of professions. It’s precisely the kind of work computers are meant to be good at. That’s the market the company is wading into.
This also is a great example of using benefits-forward storytelling: You’re not selling an LLM or a virtual assistant. You’re selling a solution to some very specific problems, experienced by clearly defined target audiences.
Consider the following slide a masterclass in “show, don’t tell”:
Decent differentiation
OpenAI is a formidable competitor, as is IBM’s Watson, as are oodles of other platforms. The question becomes: How can a tiny startup with $3 million in the bank stand out? Well, small real estate companies are unlikely to write their own code to customize the large platforms. An off-the-shelf smaller tool, pretrained and customized to the use case, may have a fighting chance by selling a more targeted, niche product into verticals where it can get some foothold. It’s a high-risk approach; the other platforms are rolling out feature sets at quite a clip, and their enormous economies of scale mean that they are usually very cheap.
As a data point, a tool I built that’s now analyzed close to 1,000 pitch decks, has used less than $25 worth of AI credits to do it, in total. When the competitors are almost unfathomably cheap, you’d best have a strong differentiator, because you aren’t going to be competing on price.
Adjacent-market sizing
Fifth Dimension does something very clever on slides 10 and 11: It shows that the first market it is going after is enormous, but it makes the argument that the adjacent markets that this unlocks are even bigger. The company comes dangerously close to flirting with being unfocused, but that note aside, this is very well done:
Now, there are companies building AI tools in each of these verticals. Findable is building a solution for proptech, Likely AI and HouseCanary are doing it for real estate, and the finance industry? Well, there’s no shortage of tools for that market, and as we’ll get to in just a moment, Fifth Dimension failed to add a competition slide to its slide deck.
There are a few red flags in the deck, which would give me a lot of pause as a potential investor. In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Fifth Dimension AI could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
Three things that could be improved
There’s a lot of things right with Fifth Dimension’s deck, but there are a few major issues as well.
What about the competition?
Every high-data industry is a potential target for AI, and we are headed toward a startup bloodbath. If you’re going to build something in this space, you’d best know who your competitors are — and be well differentiated from them. The absence of a competitive landscape slide is pretty much unforgivable. It means one of three things: The company doesn’t think it has competitors (that’s bad), it’s scared of the competitors (also not great), or the founding team is unsophisticated enough that it doesn’t think it needs to talk about the competition.
Dismal traction slide
You can’t say you’ve signed up your first five paying customers and then not report how much they are paying and how the revenue is developing over time. Sure, the company only has three months’ worth of data, but slap it in a spreadsheet and turn it into a chart.
“We have paying customers” and then not saying how much revenue you are making is begging for some in-depth diligence and cross-examination.
Doing 30 research interviews is a bare minimum. No gold star; that’s literally the very least you can do as a founder.
And finally, “developed a sales pipeline” is the fuzziest, fluffiest traction metric I’ve seen in a while. What’s the value of the pipeline? How many customers are converting? There’s so much data missing here that my Spidey senses are tingling.
A suspicious fuzziness on the tech side
It’s unclear what the technology advantage is in this case. The company vaguely hints at proprietary data on its moat slide, but it doesn’t say anything about whether it built its own models or if it is using a customized off-the-shelf AI solution. If I squint, I see a company here that I could easily replicate in a month of development.
The company doesn’t really describe anything that’s hard or unique. That’s making me scared: Most of the AI decks I see these days have an obvious advantage due to proprietary, defendable technology. There’s none of that present here. Before I’d consider investing, I’d need to do a deep dive on the tech.
Startups need to explain why what they’re doing is moderately hard to replicate. The real estate market is huge, cutthroat, and has some major players in it (do a quick Google search for real estate CRM, and you’ll see what I mean). If this tech is built on top of something like OpenAI, you’d better believe that any of the large CRM companies with products focused on the real estate market will have competing solutions on the market before long. The scary advantage that these incumbents have is that they already have the customer base, so they start with a tremendous head start.
The full pitch deck
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