We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck this London startup used to raise $8.5 million from VCs to take on WhatsApp and Slack

New Vector

New Vector CEO Matthew Hodgson

• London-based startup New Vector raised $8.5 million to further expand its secure, decentralized messaging system Matrix.
• The company used a 19-slide pitch deck to lure in investment from prominent tech VCs including Notion Capital, Dawn Capital, and Firstminute Capital.
• New Vector has clients including the French government and the UK's National Health Service (NHS) on board already and wants to challenge WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram.
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A London-based startup is trying to decentralize communication in the same way blockchain has attempted to decentralise finance.

New Vector, led by CEO Matthew Hodgson, has just raised an $8.5 million Series A funding round from venture capital investors to expand as it looks to take on big-name competitors like Whatsapp, Telegram, and Slack. The company's Matrix chat software is already in use by the French government and the UK's National Health Service (NHS) - the world's third largest employer.

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The startup, founded in 2017, received the funding from Notion Capital, Dawn Capital, and Firstminute Capital, having previously raised a $5 million seed round in January 2018.

"We want to do for communication what bitcoin did for finance by decentralizing away from Google and Facebook and one day we will be as accessible as Whatsapp or Slack," Hodgson told Business Insider in an interview. "This fundraising is the result of six months of hard work and we're very happy with the result."

Under New Vector's decentralised system, users own and control the data they transmit - unlike in a traditional, centralised system where an organisation like Facebook owns user data. The startup claims this makes the product more secure, and less susceptible to privacy concerns.

The company has worked with 16 ministries within the French government to bring its staff onto the Matrix system, and plans on expanding its product offering going forward. New Vector is entirely based on open source software.

You can check out the company's 19-slide (redacted) pitch deck that it used to lure in investment from prominent VCs here: