Investor-Ready: Financial Foundation, Use of Funds & the Deck

Sep 30, 2026 5:30pm to 6:30pm

Investors evaluate the story and the numbers together — and most first decks fail because the two don’t line up. This session builds the financial foundation, use-of-funds plan, and pitch deck as one connected package, including how to state your AI advantage explicitly rather than leaving investors to infer it.

**What We’ll Cover**

* Building an 18-month forecast grounded in real assumptions
* Use of funds: tying every dollar requested to a specific milestone
* Unit economics, burn, and runway investors will ask about
* Deck structure: what belongs on each slide and what to cut
* Articulating an AI moat — what’s defensible versus what’s just tooling
* Aligning the narrative and the numbers so they reinforce each other

**Who Should Attend**
Missouri founders preparing to pitch, revising a deck that isn’t landing, or assembling investor materials for the first time.

**What You’ll Leave With**

* A use-of-funds and 18-month forecast
* A first-draft investor deck
* An articulated AI moat

Part of the Show-Me Founders Series.

*This project is supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number SSBCI-21031-0104 awarded to the State of Missouri by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.*