A use of funds pie chart is the funding slide of a pitch deck in one picture: how the money you raise will be split between product, sales, team and the rest. Enter the amount for each category, and the chart shows each one as a share of the round. The example splits a €500,000 pre-seed round into five slices.
Investors read this slide to answer one question: does this founder know what the money is for? A clean chart with sensible proportions answers it before you say a word.
What goes into a use of funds chart?
Four to six categories that add up to the full round:
- Product and engineering: developers, design, tools, the next product release.
- Sales and marketing: the channels that bring in your first or next paying customers.
- Hiring and operations: the people outside the product team, office, software, accounting.
- Legal and admin: incorporation, contracts, IP protection, the fundraising itself.
- Reserve: a buffer for delays. Investors trust a plan with slack more than a plan that spends every euro.
How do early-stage startups split the money?
Proportions depend on the business, and there is no standard to copy. Pre-seed and seed decks tend to follow a pattern, though:
| Category | Typical share at pre-seed and seed |
|---|---|
| Product and engineering | 35% to 50% |
| Sales and marketing | 20% to 35% |
| Hiring and operations | 10% to 20% |
| Legal and admin | 5% to 10% |
| Reserve | 5% to 15% |
A software startup leans toward product, a consumer brand toward marketing, a hardware company toward engineering and production. What investors check is whether the biggest slice matches the biggest risk. If the product isn’t built yet, a marketing-heavy split raises questions; if the product works and nobody buys it, a product-heavy split does.
How do you build the numbers behind the slices?
Work bottom-up, from the plan to the chart:
- Set the goal of the round: the results you must reach before the next raise, such as 1,000 paying users or a working pilot with three customers.
- List what it takes: the hires (with their start month and salary), the marketing tests, the tools, the legal work.
- Multiply by the runway: most seed investors expect 18 to 24 months. Six hires for 18 months is a very different slice from six hires for 6 months.
- Add the reserve and round the total to the amount you raise.
- Enter the category totals into the maker above. The percentages follow by themselves.
Keep the spreadsheet behind the chart ready. The first follow-up question on this slide is almost always “how did you get to that number?”
How do you design the slide?
- One chart, one sentence. Title the slide with the takeaway, such as Half of the round builds the product, and let the chart prove it.
- Biggest slice first, at 12 o’clock. Tick Largest first.
- Labels on the slices, amounts in the legend. Nobody should have to count colors.
- A donut with the total in the middle works well on a slide: the donut chart maker prints the amount raised in the center of the ring.
- The same colors as the rest of the deck. Click each color square in the table to match your brand colors.
Download the SVG for Keynote, PowerPoint or Google Slides when you want to resize the chart without blur, or the PNG for quick use.
Which use of funds mistakes do investors notice?
- Percentages without an amount. “40% for marketing” of what? Put the size of the round in the title.
- A “Miscellaneous” slice bigger than 10%. It reads as “we haven’t planned this part”.
- Founder salaries hidden in “Operations”. Name them; reasonable salaries are expected.
- A chart that doesn’t match the financial model. Investors compare the two, so update both together.
Where can you go from here?
For the rest of the deck, Fe/male Switch has a guide to the pre-seed pitch deck structure, a free PowerPoint pitch deck template and an overview of startup funding stages. For the team slide, the gender pie chart shows the founding team’s composition, and the pie chart maker with percentages handles any other breakdown in the deck.
Fe/male Switch is a startup game and incubator where women build a company from the first idea to the pitch, use of funds slide included.
Published 26 October 2026 · by the Fe/male Switch team