What a use of funds slide has to show
Strip it back and there are four things on the slide. The guides that rank for this all land somewhere near the same list, and Waveup's version is a fair summary: the amount and round, a budget split, milestones tied to that split, and runway.
Everything else is optional. Valuation and deal terms don't belong here at all (Waveup lists putting them on the slide as one of its five common mistakes, and I agree: terms are a conversation, not a chart).
- The ask: amount and round, in the headline or directly under it
- The split: four to six spending categories, each with a percentage and a dollar figure
- The milestones: what each block of spend is meant to produce, with a date
- The runway: how many months the round covers at the planned burn
Categories: fewer, bigger, and never equal
You're showing the big blocks of spend, not a budget. Startups.com puts it plainly: these are "the biggest categories of spend for our given period of investment", not every last dollar. Their own example is three lines: $600k engineering, $400k marketing, $200k management.
Waveup suggests keeping each category at 10% or more of the total. That's a useful test. If a line is smaller than that, fold it into something bigger or move it to the appendix. Legal fees and software subscriptions don't need their own wedge.
Watch for splits that look suspiciously tidy, too. Story Pitch Decks calls out equal splits like 33/33/33 as a warning sign, and I'd go further. An even split tells an investor you haven't decided what matters most. Real plans are lopsided.
One more point on hiring lines. Matt Wilson of Allied Venture Partners argues for "positions before people": work out which roles carry your advantage before you budget for headcount. On the slide, that means "Team" is a weak label. "Two senior sales hires for the mid-market push" is a strong one.
Pie chart or bar chart for a use of funds slide?
Most templates default to a pie or donut, and Decktopus recommends pies for simple four-to-six category splits. I rarely use one.
A pie asks the reader to compare angles, and people are bad at that. Is the product wedge 35% or 40%? You can't tell without the label, and once you're reading labels the chart is decoration. Pies also force the legend off to the side, so the eye bounces between colour and key.
My default is a single horizontal stacked bar across the full slide width, or a short list of horizontal bars sorted largest first. Each bar carries its own label, percentage and dollar figure right next to it. No legend. The biggest bet sits at the top, where a skimming reader starts.
- Sort categories from largest to smallest, never alphabetically
- Put the label and both numbers on the bar itself, not in a legend
- Use one accent colour for the category the round is mostly about, and greys for the rest
- Round to the nearest $50k or 5% so the numbers read at a glance
Tie every block of money to a milestone
This is where the slide earns its place. A chart of spend on its own tells an investor what you'll buy. The milestone next to it tells them what they'll own afterwards.
Layout-wise, I put the milestone on the same row as its budget line. $1.2M in go-to-market sits beside the revenue target it's meant to hit, with a quarter attached. The reader's eye moves left to right, from cost to outcome, without hunting.
Waveup's example of a good milestone is "$1M ARR by Q4 2026" rather than something like "product-market fit". That's the right instinct. If you can't put a number and a date on it, it isn't a milestone yet. I made the same argument about the ask in my seed pitch deck guide: investors care less about how long the money lasts than about what's true when it runs out.
Runway: say it once, in months
Waveup treats 18 months as the default and flags anything under 12 as a sign of desperation, and over 24 as a sign you're raising too much. Whatever your number, state it once, in months, near the ask. Don't make an investor divide the round by your burn in their head.
Designing the slide for a two-minute read
Dropbox DocSend's research found VCs spend just under two and a half minutes in total looking at a deck. Your use of funds slide sits near the end, so it gets whatever attention is left. Design for that.
Write the headline as the claim, not the topic. "Use of Funds" is a label. "$3M to reach $1M ARR and a Series A in 18 months" is a headline, and it does most of the slide's work before anyone looks at the chart.
Then check it on a phone. Plenty of decks get opened on one, and a bar chart with 10pt labels becomes grey noise. If the labels aren't readable at phone size, you have too many categories or too much text. The same rules from my pitch deck design checklist apply here: one idea per slide, body type large enough to survive a small screen.
What changes by stage
Early on, the split leans heavily towards product and the first hires. Later, go-to-market takes the bigger share. Waveup's rough Series A benchmark is 50% go-to-market, 30% product and 20% operations; Decktopus gives wider ranges by category. Treat these as a sense check rather than a target. If your split looks nothing like them, the slide needs one sentence explaining why.
For later rounds, the most persuasive thing you can add is proof that the last round's money did what you said it would. A small "last round" bar showing planned versus actual spend, with the milestones hit, carries more weight than any forecast.
A quick checklist before you send the deck
Run through this on the final version. If you'd rather hand the whole deck over, that's what I do.
- Headline states the amount, the outcome and the time frame
- Four to six categories, sorted largest first, none under 10%
- Every category shows a percentage and a dollar figure
- Each block of spend has a dated milestone on the same row
- Runway stated once, in months
- No valuation or deal terms on the slide
- Labels readable on a phone screen