- The HR-tech startup Pasito just raised a $3.25 million seed round without a pitch deck.
- The firm raised the money from investors like Google, Y Combinator, and FiDi Ventures.
- CEO Pauline Roteta told Insider that demos, not a pitch deck, helped it land VCs.
Pasito, an HR-tech startup, raised $3.25 million in seed funding on Monday led by Google and Y Combinator — and it did so without a pitch deck.
Instead, CEO Pauline Roteta demoed the product and laid out the benefits to not just employees but also companies wanting to save money. That generated a lot of interest from investors and helped it stand out in a hot market for human-resources tech, Roteta, also a cofounder of Pasito, told Insider. FiDi Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, and several angel investors also participated in the round.
"Once we were able to sell the vision and show an actual, real product, not an idea but actual product being used, that's what got people over the line," Roteta told Insider.
Being able to communicate a clear road map of growth, while keeping the problem and proposed solution simple, was key to success, she said.
Roteta is as a financial planner at the investment giant BlackRock. She founded Pasito with Ignacio Ampuero, who previously worked at Amazon on its Alexa service, and Julie Scotland, who worked at MyCase, a company offering legal-software management. They founded the startup after Roteta used her financial-planning skills to help a family member who had struggled for hours to navigate their options for benefits and health plans.
The HR-tech firm pulls data from across internal records and the US census to pair workers with health insurance and retirement plans. Pasito, which translates to "small step" in Spanish, integrates with a company's payroll and HR program to navigate the options available to employees.
Pasito enters a hot market for HR tech. HiBob, a benefits and payroll startup, just closed a $150 million Series D in August. And Factorial, an HR-tech startup that offers payroll and sick-leave benefits to smaller and medium-size companies, became Spain's latest unicorn after it closed a round at $120 million in October. Other firms like Oyster have been growing steadily growing and hiring.
With its latest round, Pasito plans to invest in covering more benefits and improving its software to pull from more data sources.
"By having a much-better tech platform for employees that also saves companies money, that's really a win-win," Roteta said. "That's really where we've seen a lot of success."
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