In September 2019, a man who had sold a company to Microsoft for a reported $100 million to $200 million wrote on Twitter that he was still sad. Microsoft, he said, had wanted to shut his old app down. The man was Christian Reber, and the app was Wunderlist.
Reber has told a podcast that he 'accidentally started a company' when he moved to Berlin at 18. That accident grew into Wunderlist, a to-do list app that became a fixture on many phones. In 2015 Microsoft bought it. It looked like the clean ending every founder dreams of. For Reber it was something more tangled. He has since said in interviews that he questioned whether the sale was a mistake, and he watched the product he loved get folded into a larger suite and then retired.
Wunderlist had taught him how a Berlin team could ship software that felt designed rather than assembled, and investors remembered.
Most founders would have taken the money and rested. Reber went looking for the next thing that Microsoft owned in people's heads. The answer was the slide deck. Every company, school and startup made them, nearly everyone hated making them, and the tool of choice was a desktop program designed decades earlier. His pitch to investors was blunt: build the 'YouTube for presentations', with sharing, comments and version history as native features rather than afterthoughts.
What gave the idea weight was the people behind it. Wunderlist had taught him how a Berlin team could ship software that felt designed rather than assembled, and investors remembered. BlueYard Capital backed the first round in 2018. A $30 million round followed in October 2019, with Thrive Capital and Index Ventures involved, and Slack among the names. By then the company had been in existence barely a year and a half.
The real test came in May 2021. Pitch raised $85 million from Lakestar and Tiger Global at a valuation reported at $600 million, even though only a couple of thousand people were paying $10 a month for the Pro tier. About 125,000 workspaces were using the product, with Intercom, Superhuman and Notion among the named customers. Reber leaned on his nationality, telling TechCrunch that 'as a German business, we have a special relationship with data privacy.'
Then came the part nobody on a funding-announcement day talks about. Pitch was selling into a market where the incumbents are free or bundled, and a wave of AI tools after 2023 changed what people expected from slides. Third-party estimates put revenue at roughly $9.4 million in 2024, a modest figure against the ambition of 2021. Leadership changed too, with Adam Renklint listed as CEO in recent profiles.
The lesson inside Reber's story is a quiet one. He did not escape the grief of Wunderlist by winning once. He went back to the same hard problem, productivity software that people love, and tried to own it this time. Whether Pitch gets there is still open. But a founder who treats a sale as a wound, not a trophy, tends to build differently the second time.