Frustrating attempts at manually sifting through templates, text boxes and image sizes in Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides, struggling to add pointers on the smartphone while rushing to a meeting…What if you could do it all with just a prompt?

To enable storytelling outside the “walled gardens of Microsoft and Google”, two former product leads at Facebook and Instagram developed Tome—an artificial intelligence-driven storytelling platform. It holds the record for the fastest productivity tool to reach a million users. Faster than Dropbox, Zoom and Slack.

The brainchild of Henri Liriani and Keith Peiris, Tome can generate everything from children’s bedtime stories and startup pitch decks to 3D prototypes. The genesis of the idea was born when Peiris was building the augmented reality camera feature for Instagram.

Tome Founders

“I was thinking, we have made it really easy to share your face, what you are eating for lunch and what you are doing with your family on the weekend, but if you want to share something in your head, like an idea or a concept, you have to use a document like a PowerPoint,” Peiris told CNBC-TV18 in Young Turks “Voices of the Valley” special.

“These tools came in the 1980s that were designed to physically print a document or display using an overhead projector,” he said.

Liriani and Peiris tinkered with Tome for two years until OpenAI’s ChatGPT opened new frontiers and the founders were quick to integrate it in 2022, with the large language model (LLM) enabling the startup to work ‘higher up in the idea creation process’.

“You show up to our product with a kernel of an idea and we help you build out the narrative, help you with research, sharpen what you have, so that your artifact is persuasive and engaging,” said Peiris.

“We aren't building AI slides. We are building a product that through a single prompt can build a presentation, website, a blog and more…” he added.

With OpenAI or StabilityAI-like Generative AI layers, Tome allows users to type a prompt into the command bar and generates a presentation, outline, or story—complete with text and images. Further prompts can be used to add new pages with more context.

The platform uses AI to rewrite text with the right tone and length, change image styles, and edit image output to bring the story to life, allowing live embeds, interactive product mocks, 3D prototypes, data and web pages more directly onto your page.

After testing the product, one of the startup’s investors remarked, “Remember the first time you went from doing freehand math to using a calculator? It feels like that level of magic. Now, the limitations of Tome are only bound by a creator’s imagination.”

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (also Partner at Greylock VC) is an investor and so is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who participated in the more recent $43 million Series B fundraise, which was led by Lightspeed, reportedly at a valuation of $300 million. Since its inception, Tome has raised more than $80 million.

After launching in September 2022, Tome had garnered six million subscribers by the time of the Lightspeed-led fundraise. While its user base is accelerating fast, is there a risk of incumbents Microsoft (investor in OpenAI) and Google (Bard, Anthropic…) catching up with Generative AI additions as co-pilots to their product offerings? Several design unicorns like Canva and Coda are experimenting with AI too.

"What we are seeing is a surface-level response. They are playing in the last mile of documents and presentations. We are moving to a higher level of idea generation process,” defends Peiris.

“We are moving to a world where you can show up on Tome with an idea for a pitch deck or a memo. We ask you questions, ingest data from your enterprise or hard drive, shape your idea and crystallise it to the point where we are actually helping you structure thought rather than helping you move images or text around in a box,” he added.

Defending the thesis, Lightspeed partner Dev Khare said, "The answer lies in history. Did Electronic Arts win mobile games? No, Zynga did. Did some taxi company win the mobile war? No. Uber did. Ola in India. Every new platform has brought about a shift in the leaders in that category. That's the opportunity with Tome."

Khare further said, "Who is going to be idea generation leader in this new world? Who knows? But, it is certainly not the leaders of 10 years ago, even though they are making defensive moves with co-pilots. But, it is going to be a new generation. That's what history shows us."