Startup Pitch Deck — Tendril

Company: Tendril Stage / round: Seed Prepared by: Priya Nair & Marcus Webb, Co-founders Date: 4 June 2026

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Slide 1 — Title / vision

Tendril — the operating system for agencies that run on freelancers. Vision: every agency can scale its team up and down in a day, without losing control of quality, cost, or deadlines.

Slide 2 — Problem

Creative and marketing agencies now run on freelancers — but they manage them with spreadsheets, chat threads, and four disconnected tools. The result:

• Project managers lose ~6 hours a week chasing availability, files, and timesheets.
• 1 in 5 freelance invoices has an error, creating disputes and slow payments.
• Agencies have no single view of who is working on what, so they overbook stars and miss deadlines.

For a 20-person agency, that lost time and rework costs an estimated $120,000 a year.

Slide 3 — Solution

Tendril is one place to staff, brief, track, and pay a freelance team:

• Roster & availability — see every freelancer's skills, rate, and free days at a glance.
• Briefs & tracking — assign work, track progress, and keep files in one thread per project.
• Approvals & pay — approve timesheets and pay freelancers in two clicks, with invoices generated automatically.

One tool replaces the spreadsheet plus three point apps.

Slide 4 — Why now

Freelancers now make up over a third of agency delivery, up sharply post-2023, but the tooling was built for full-time staff. Cheap payment rails and AI-assisted matching finally make a lightweight, agency-specific platform viable. The behaviour shift is here; the tooling has not caught up.

Slide 5 — Market size

• TAM: ~110,000 creative and marketing agencies in our launch markets x $4,800/yr = $528M.
• SAM: agencies of 10–100 people that rely on freelancers — $190M.
• SOM (3 yr): 1.5% of SAM — $2.9M ARR.

Sized bottom-up from agency counts and our current $400/month average contract value.

Slide 6 — Product

A clean web app plus a freelancer mobile view. The roster screen is what teams love most: drag a freelancer onto a project and Tendril checks their availability, rate, and current load in real time, then drafts the brief. Files, messages, and approvals all live against the project — no more hunting across tools.

Slide 7 — Traction

• $28K MRR ($336K ARR run-rate), up from $7K MRR six months ago — 4x in 6 months.
• 64 paying agencies, average contract value $440/month and climbing.
• Net revenue retention 118% — customers expand as they add freelancers.
• Logo churn under 2%/month; one design network expanded from 1 to 9 seats in a quarter.

Slide 8 — Business model

SaaS, priced per active agency seat: $49 per project-manager seat / month, freelancers free. Typical agency runs 5–12 paid seats.

• Gross margin 86%.
• CAC $540, blended LTV $5,900 — LTV:CAC of ~11:1.
• Payback in under 5 months.

Slide 9 — Competition / why you win

	General PM tools	Freelance marketplaces	Tendril
Built for agencies	No	No	Yes
Manages your own freelancers	Partial	No (their pool)	Yes
Pay + invoicing built in	No	Marketplace-locked	Yes

Generic PM tools do not handle pay; marketplaces want to own the freelancer relationship. Tendril is the only tool built for agencies managing their own freelance bench — and our data on rates and reliability deepens with every project, getting harder to copy.

Slide 10 — Team

• Priya Nair (CEO) — ran ops at a 40-person creative agency for 6 years; lived this problem daily.
• Marcus Webb (CTO) — former staff engineer on a payments platform; built our invoicing and payout core.
• Advised by the former COO of a 300-person agency network.

We are the rare team that has both run an agency and built payments infrastructure.

Slide 11 — Financials

Metric	2026	2027	2028
Paying agencies	110	380	1,050
ARR	$0.6M	$2.4M	$7.1M
Headcount	9	22	41

Key assumptions: 12% net new logos/month, ACV rising to $560/month, retention held above 110%.

Slide 12 — The ask

We are raising a $1.5M seed to reach $1.5M ARR and 250 agencies in 18 months. The round funds:

• 3 engineers to ship native payouts and AI staffing suggestions.
• 2 go-to-market hires to scale our agency-referral channel.
• ~20 months of runway to the metrics that support a Series A.

Next step: we would love 30 minutes to walk you through the live product and our cohort data.