PowerPoint alternative tool Tome AI has snapped up $43 million in Series B funding, bringing the platform’s total value to $300 million.
The AI-driven platform accomplished the feat without making a single sale, according to Forbes. Founded by former Meta managers Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, Tome utilizes GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to produce a presentation in a matter of seconds based on a typed description.
Headlined by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Series B investors include Coatue, Greylock, Stability.ai CEO Emad Mostaque and past Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Series A funding had already brought the company to a $175 million valuation.
It took the CEOs two years to develop Tome before they published a free beta test version of the platform in September. After integrating AI models from OpenAI in November, it surpassed a million users by February, which according to the founders marks the fastest growth of any productivity tool.
“We set out to build a company that can help anyone tell a compelling story,” Peiris told Forbes. “Storytelling is the elementary building block of productivity for humanity, from cave drawings to stories around the fire to PowerPoint.”
Tome was partly inspired by the founders’ issues with Microsoft PowerPoint, the industry-standard digital presentation tool. Peiris and Liriani’s goal is for other software startups to use the platform, allowing “us all to have a chance, versus only working in Microsoft’s walled garden,” they said.
Although presentations are its most popular output, Tome has all kinds of storytelling capabilities, from visual blog posts to bedtime stories to 3D prototypes.
Tome will begin charging subscribers a $10 monthly fee later this year, when it launches an enterprise version.
