Deck triage
Deck triage is the first-pass sorting of a batch of pitch decks into explicit outcomes, typically advance, hold or decline, with a recorded reason for each. It is a gate, not a ranking: the job is to route every deck to the right next step under the same rules, before scarce reviewer time is spent on any of them.
The metaphor is accurate. Triage sorts by what should happen next, not by final worth.
The pile decides before anyone does.
Open calls, demo days and inbound deal flow produce hundreds of decks; partner and judge attention covers dozens. The default fix is skimming, and skimming has a shape: order effects, fatigue, and a deck read at number 200 that would have advanced at number 3. Nobody chose those outcomes. The pile did.
Triage as a discipline replaces the skim with three commitments: every deck is read against the same criteria, every deck leaves with an explicit outcome and a recorded reason, and hold is a legitimate outcome, meaning evidence was missing rather than the company weak. The recorded reason is what separates a gate from a black-box filter: it is the sentence you can say to the founder who asks why.
A gate with a memo.
In EvalLens, every deck in the batch gets a full read from six independent judges, and the triage output is a screening memo per deck: scores with cited evidence, what was missing, and a routing recommendation. It is a first-gate document by design, not an investment-committee memo, and we say so plainly. The AI read stays an advisory score: the human reviewer owns the gate, the memo just means the decision starts from evidence instead of a skim. AI prepares the analysis, people decide.