Wunderlist's founders raise $19M Series A for Pitch, a presentation tool they plan to launch by summer 2019
Microsoft's Powerpoint today has over 1 billion installs, 500 million users, and some 95 percent market share, making it the most ubiquitous presentation software in the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
The team behind Pitch already has history with Microsoft: it built Wunderlist and then sold the app to Microsoft in 2015, so its return with a presentation tool is a second act aimed squarely at an Office franchise. The target is enormous — PowerPoint holds roughly 95 percent market share across more than 1 billion installs and 500 million users — and Microsoft's own earlier challenger effort, opening up Sway, never displaced it.
First-order effects
- With $19M in Series A capital, Pitch can staff toward its planned summer 2019 launch and compete on collaboration rather than file compatibility, where PowerPoint's installed base gives it no defensive moat yet.
- Microsoft now faces a credible, well-funded attack on one of its most ubiquitous Office apps from founders who know how its productivity business works from the inside.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent players validate the same wedge: Showpad raised $70M for sales-focused presentation collateral and Matik later raised $20M for automated personalized decks, meaning Pitch lands in a category where capital is already flowing toward rethinking how decks get made.
- If Pitch's collaborative model gains traction, Microsoft is pushed to respond within Office itself — either modernizing PowerPoint's collaboration or leaning on newer properties — rather than treating the format as settled.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to presentation software splitting into layers — creation, collaboration, and delivery — letting challengers chip away at a 95-percent-share incumbent without beating it head-on, much as Pitch's own later rounds would fund that expansion.
The trend: Collaborative-first challengers are systematically attacking single-player Office-era formats, with successive venture rounds — Pitch's $30M beta round and $85M follow-on among them — underwriting the long campaign against PowerPoint.