Series Pitch Deck

The deck and the round

Round

Seed

Raised in the round

Not disclosed

Year

2026

Slides

10

Category

AI

Headquarters

New York, USA

Founded

2025

Series’s pitch deck, slide by slide

1. 1

   Find your people on iMessage

   Cover

   Series, "the professional network for Gen Z", under the line "Find your people on iMessage".

2. 2

   Our thesis

   Why now

   Two platform shifts side by side: the App Store in 2008, an interface 650M people use every week, and ChatGPT in 2022, which made conversation the interface for 1B people. The implication is left for the next slide: the next network is built in conversation.

3. 3

   The problem

   Problem

   Networking online means cold-messaging people on an app, and 97% of those messages never get a reply; posting publicly instead reaches everyone, which means no one. A mock inbox of unanswered coffee-chat and co-founder requests makes the point.

4. 4

   Our solution

   Solution

   One line: Series is the first professional network built the way Gen Z communicates, entirely on iMessage.

5. 5

   How does Series work?

   Product

   There are no cold DMs on Series. Users write a "share", a short note on who they are and who they want to meet, and Series sends it to the right people. Each user gets a personalized carousel of shares, swipes through them and replies to the ones they want, which starts a conversation.

6. 6

   Our team

   Team

   A team of 8 with an average age of 23; 65% write code, and members have worked at Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, Raytheon and Apple. The point it ends on: most of them are still in school, the exact users Series is built for.

7. 7

   Our traction

   Traction

   The deck's longest conversation. Shares get a 41% response rate. 79% of users are back within 7 days and 62% by day 30, which the deck puts in the top 5% by a16z's benchmark and well above LinkedIn. 62% of users who make a first connection come back to make more, and 82% of those who connect by day 4 are back by day 30. 95% of users are entrepreneurs, on 750+ campuses.

8. 8

   Our GTM

   Go-to-market

   Where users come from: LinkedIn, and campus by campus, with events, ambassadors and in-person activations, because a network's first users set its culture and Series wanted student entrepreneurs first. It hasn't built referral mechanics yet; growth week over week is mostly word of mouth, at about $1 to acquire a student on a campus. Over the next 12 to 24 months the focus moves from go-to-market to network effects.

9. 9

   Our focus

   Business model

   Series is pre-revenue by choice and has started validating demand with letters of intent for recruiting access (the posted slide leaves the figure out). The model: firms reach exactly the people they want, inside iMessage. LinkedIn's recruiting business does $10B+ a year at a 57% read rate; Series' messages are read 80% of the time. For now, the focus is network density.

10. 10

    Our invitation

    Other

    No ask slide: "if any of this resonated with you, let's chat", with the line "the future is conversation, so we made sure our deck was one too" and Johnson's Yale email.

The numbers in the deck

Cold DMs that never get a reply · slide 3

97%

Response rate on shares · slide 7

41%

Users back within 7 days / 30 days · slide 7

79% / 62%

Back by day 30 after connecting by day 4 · slide 7

82%

Campuses · slide 7

750+

Cost to acquire a student on campus · slide 8

~$1

Message read rate, Series vs LinkedIn Recruiter · slide 9

80% vs 57%

Team · slide 6

8 people, average age 23

What stands out

1. 1

   The format is the pitch. A product that lives in iMessage pitches in iMessage bubbles: grey for the investor's questions ("how do you know this is working?", "how does that scale with burn?"), blue for the answers. It answers the follow-up questions before an investor asks them.

2. 2

   Retention leads, not growth. With no revenue, the traction slide shows day-7 and day-30 retention against a16z's benchmark and LinkedIn, then what an active user does, which is the evidence a network needs at seed.

3. 3

   The cold start is treated as a choice. Seeding the network with student entrepreneurs, campus by campus at about $1 a student, is framed as setting the network's culture, with network effects named as the next 12 to 24 months' work.

4. 4

   Pre-revenue, with a model sketched against the incumbent. Slide 9 points to LinkedIn's $10B+ recruiting business and compares read rates (80% against 57%) instead of showing a pricing plan.

5. 5

   No ask on the last slide. The deck ends on an invitation to talk and the founder's email, and leaves the round's size out.

Sources

• Nathaneo Johnson on LinkedIn: Series Pitch Deck, “for our Seed Round” (May 2026)
• Business Insider: 2 Yale students raised $5 million for their social network that lives in iMessage. Read their pitch deck. (May 15, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Two college kids raise a $5.1 million pre-seed to build an AI social network in iMessage (Apr 24, 2026)

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