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Pitch Deck Evaluation and Analysis
River places every figure in the deck by its evidence: what the deck states, what you had to derive, and what it never says.
Search how to evaluate a pitch deck and most of what returns is written for the person who assembled it. Which slide goes where, how to open, what to cut. The advice aimed at the reader instead arrives as a request: query the database, check the figures against the payment processor, ask for the data room. None of that is available at eleven at night, with the file in your inbox and a call to accept or decline by morning.
A public filing shows what a deck leaves out. Etsy's 2025 annual report prints two top lines in one table: gross merchandise sales of $11.9 billion and revenue of $2.88 billion. The larger of the two carries a footnote reading Unaudited, and the filing says the figure does not represent revenue earned. That year the two moved apart, sales falling 5.3% while revenue rose 2.7%. Both are correct, and a deck printing either one alone would be accurate.
This does that job on a deck, without the footnotes to help. Each figure belongs in one of three places. Stated means the deck printed it. Derived means you computed it from figures the deck printed. Absent means the input never appears. A growth rate you worked out from two revenue numbers is yours rather than the company's, and it stays labelled that way. The run compares nothing to an outside benchmark, scores nothing and recommends nothing.
One filing, two true top lines, and the footnote a deck does not have
Etsy's number is $11,916,900 thousand of merchandise sales and $2,883,501 thousand of revenue. The first is 4.13 times the second, and $9,033.4 million sits between them. Both describe the same twelve months of the same business. A deck could say sales fell 5%, or that sales grew 3%. Neither would be false. It is the same gap a marketplace payout opens between the sales it settles and the cash that lands. The filing closes it because it must.
The closing is done in footnotes. Footnote 1 marks the merchandise figure, free cash flow and both user counts as unaudited. Footnote 3 gives the take rate's formula, revenue divided by merchandise sales. Footnote 4 concedes that a single person can hold several seller accounts and count once in each, so the 8,762 thousand active sellers is not a count of people. Every one is a definition that changes the number above it, which is why a field's own dictionary entry matters more than the value in the cell.
Nothing compels a deck to write any of it. A public filer showing a non-standard figure must show the comparable one with equal or greater prominence. The SEC treats presenting revenue on a gross basis when net presentation is required as potentially misleading. A company raising from accredited investors under Rule 506(b) is not required to provide specified disclosure documents at all. The deck is the disclosure, so the reading has to be closer.
How it works
Paste the deck
Slide text as it appears, including the metrics slide and any appendix figures that came with it.
Place every figure
Each one lands in stated, derived or absent, carrying the slide number it was read from.
Show the arithmetic
Derived figures print their inputs, so anyone can redo the division and arrive at the same number.
Name what is open
A definition the deck never fixes is reported as unfixed, which is different from reporting it as wrong.
What you get
- Every figure placed as stated, derived or absent, with the slide it was read from
- Derived figures carry their inputs, so your growth rate is never mistaken for theirs
- Definitions the deck leaves open, listed as open rather than as claims that are wrong
- A sheet of the extraction, and a doc reading each claim against the evidence offered
- No benchmark, no percentile and no score: nothing the deck itself did not supply
- The questions each figure leaves unanswered, written from the document, not from intent
Common questions
Does this tell me whether to invest?
No, and it is built not to. There is no score, no rating and no recommendation anywhere in the output, because a figure's evidence and a decision about a company are different things. What comes back is what the document does and does not establish. The judgment stays with you, which is the only place it can sit. A verdict against thresholds you set is a separate artifact.
What if a number in the deck is simply wrong?
Then it is reported differently from one that cannot be checked, because those are not the same finding. A revenue figure that contradicts another figure in the same deck is a contradiction, and both slides get named. That is the easier case, and two reports that will not agree is its own job. A figure with no stated definition is uncheckable instead.
Can it read the PDF or the PowerPoint file?
The form here takes pasted text, so the fastest start is the slide text. Once the workspace opens you can attach the file itself, and PDF, PowerPoint and Keynote decks are all readable there. The extraction is the same either way. Pasting the metrics slides alone is usually enough to get the first pass back.
Why does it matter who computed a figure?
Because a derived figure inherits whatever definition its inputs used, and a memo that reprints it loses that. Etsy's take rate is revenue divided by merchandise sales, and the filing says so in a footnote. The same ratio computed from a deck that defines neither input has no stated meaning. It is the problem a trial balance has when one label covers two accounts.
Does it compare the company to similar startups?
No. Comparing a margin to a typical range would mean supplying a figure the deck never gave you. The run stays inside the document you supplied plus anything you paste alongside it. If you want the company's own public record instead, a research brief from its filings is a separate job. Paste figures you want compared and they count as input.
What actually counts as absent?
An input that never appears, so a figure a reader would expect cannot be computed at all. A deck printing lifetime value and cost of acquisition but no churn rate has made the lifetime value uncomputable from the page. Silence works the same way in a term sheet. It is a statement about the slides, not a claim that anything was withheld.
Pitch Deck Evaluation and Analysis
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