$9M Seed Deck Goes Viral
A startup founder shared their $9M Seed deck led by Susquehanna VC and Lightspeed India, generating 1,687 likes and 183K views. Separately, Deel announced "The Pitch" tournament offering $1M SAFEs for 10 winners and $50K for 100 regionals — totaling $15M+ in funding opportunities. DeckForge AI launched to help create investor decks in minutes.
The startup behind the viral deck is Gushwork AI, a Bengaluru-based company founded in 2023 by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh. The company develops autonomous AI agents that help businesses get discovered and cited on AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. This latest $9M round brings Gushwork's total funding to $11 million. The seed round boosted Gushwork AI's valuation to $33 million post-money. The company already serves over 300 paying customers, with about 95% based in the United States, and has another 800 on its waitlist. Subscription plans start at $800 per month, which has propelled the startup to $1.5 million in annualized recurring revenue with a monthly growth rate between 50% and 80%. Deel's "The Pitch" tournament is designed to attract over 20,000 seed-stage startups from seven global regions. Regional finals will be held in person in tech hubs like New York, Paris, Singapore, and Dubai before the global finale in May 2026. The competition is presented by J.P. Morgan and has support from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Google, and Stripe. With an anticipated final selection rate of just 0.05%, the tournament is positioned to be more selective than many of the world's top startup accelerators. The launch of tools like DeckForge AI signals a new era of automated presentation building. DeckForge specifically utilizes the AI model Claude to structure a narrative through a guided six-step form. It differentiates itself by not requiring a user sign-up, instead keeping the user's API key within their local browser to ensure privacy.
