Mise
A pitch deck system built from kitchen vernacular — translating a vertical AI product into a visual language operators actually recognize.
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context
Mise is an AI-powered operations copilot for independent restaurants — automating scheduling, inventory, review response, and staff training, so owners can spend less time on admin and more time on the line. At the time of the project, the company was preparing for a Seed round and had nothing but a name and a thesis. The challenge was to build a pitch deck system that earns credibility with VCs while signaling, instantly, that the founders understand the industry from the inside.
insight
Restaurants don't trust software. The category has been over-promised and under-delivered for two decades — clunky POS upsells, generic SaaS dashboards, "restaurant-friendly" tools designed by people who've never worked a Friday night service. The visual language of most restaurant-tech pitch decks reflects this disconnect: clean, corporate, generic. Indistinguishable from any other B2B SaaS company.
The opportunity was to do the opposite. Mise's deck needed to feel like it was made by operators, for operators — and read by investors as a signal of real domain ownership.
We developed a deck system anchored in two contrasting registers. Coarse, dithered pixel illustrations — kitchens, flames, city storefronts, scattered tickets — were used to evoke the texture of restaurant work: imperfect, hand-built, alive. These visuals carry the warmth and grit of the industry, and quietly reference an early-internet aesthetic that resonates with the technical audience the deck also has to win.
