Tome (AI)
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Last reviewed
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Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Tome was an artificial intelligence-powered presentation and storytelling platform that allowed users to generate full presentations, including text, images, and layouts, from a single text prompt. Founded in 2020 by Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, both former product leaders at Meta (Facebook and Instagram), the company introduced a tile-based, narrative-first approach to presentations that set it apart from traditional slide-deck software like Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides. Tome became one of the fastest-growing productivity tools in the generative AI era, reaching one million users within four months of its public launch and growing to over 20 million users by 2024. After raising $81 million across three funding rounds and reaching a $300 million valuation, Tome made a series of strategic pivots: first to enterprise sales automation in 2024, and then to a fully new AI-native CRM product called Lightfield in late 2025. The original presentation product was officially sunset in early 2025.
Keith Peiris, the CEO and co-founder of Tome, grew up in Ontario, Canada, and earned a BASc in Nanotechnology Engineering from the University of Waterloo (2006 to 2011). He joined Facebook in 2011 as a product manager and worked on several major products, including Predictive Search, Graph Search, and Facebook for Android. He later served as Manager of Product Management and helped build the Rotational Product Management Program at Facebook.
Peiris moved to Instagram, where he led the Messaging and Camera AR product team. Under his leadership, Instagram Direct grew more than 10x to reach 500 million monthly active users. After Instagram, he served as Head of Product at Glossier, Inc. in 2018, and then as Head of Product at Citizen in 2019, where he helped the app reach the number-one spot in the News category of the iOS App Store. Peiris joined Greylock Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in 2020, where he began building what would become Tome.
Henri Liriani, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer, spent six years at Facebook (2014 to 2020), where he led the Human Interfaces group for Messenger. In that role, he built the core messaging experience for the internal "Lightspeed" redesign project. Before Facebook, Liriani co-founded Craaave (2013 to 2014), a food-related startup, and held design positions at Perfect, Inc. (2011 to 2013) and Enhanced Labs (2007 to 2011). Both co-founders brought deep expertise in consumer product design and visual storytelling from their time building products used by hundreds of millions of people at Meta.
Peiris and Liriani started Tome in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, motivated by the observation that traditional presentation tools had not changed in decades. PowerPoint, first released in 1987, still defined how most professionals communicated ideas visually. The founders believed that generative AI could transform storytelling at work by removing the friction of creating visually compelling presentations. Their vision was to build an "AI-powered storytelling format" that could generate narratives, images, and layouts from a single text prompt, letting anyone create polished visual content regardless of design skill.
Tome raised a total of $81 million across three funding rounds between 2021 and 2023, growing its valuation from an undisclosed seed-stage figure to $300 million in under two years.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead Investor | Valuation | Key Participants |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | January 2021 | $6.3 million | Greylock Partners | Undisclosed | Reid Hoffman (Greylock partner, LinkedIn co-founder) joined the board |
| Series A | September 2021 | $26 million | Coatue Management | $175 million | Greylock Partners |
| Series B | February 2023 | $43 million | Lightspeed Venture Partners | $300 million | Coatue, Greylock, Audacious Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, 8VC |
Notable angel investors in the Series B round included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, Adept AI Labs CEO David Luan, and Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, served on Tome's board from the company's earliest days and championed the platform's potential for network effects similar to those seen in Slack.
Dan Rose, a partner at Coatue Management, led the original Coatue investment in Tome and remained a key supporter through the company's later pivots.
Tome's presentation tool used a tile-based layout system rather than the traditional slide format. Users could input a topic or prompt, and Tome's AI would generate an entire presentation outline complete with content suggestions, images, and layout recommendations. The platform was designed to produce narrative-driven, scrollable presentations that resembled interactive web pages more than static slide decks.
The core workflow was straightforward: a user typed a text prompt describing the topic or story they wanted to tell, and Tome generated a multi-page presentation with titles, body text, relevant imagery, and a coherent visual layout. Users could then edit, rearrange tiles, swap images, and refine the content manually.
Tome's AI capabilities were built on top of OpenAI's models. The platform used two primary AI systems:
| Component | Technology | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Text generation | GPT-4 (OpenAI) | Generated slide titles, headings, body text, and narrative structure from user prompts |
| Image generation | DALL-E 2 (OpenAI) | Created original images to illustrate each page based on the generated text content |
| Frontend | React | User interface and interactive tile-based editor |
| Backend | Node.js, Express | Server-side processing and API handling |
| Database | MongoDB | Data storage for user content and presentations |
In November 2022, Tome announced its official integration with DALL-E 2, bringing AI-generated images directly into the presentation creation workflow. This made Tome one of the first productivity tools to combine large language model-based text generation with text-to-image generation in a single product.
The platform later integrated Stable Diffusion as an alternative image generation model. CEO Keith Peiris indicated that Stable Diffusion offered advantages for character consistency across slides, a limitation that DALL-E 2 struggled with at the time.
Unlike traditional presentation tools that use fixed-size slides, Tome organized content into flexible "tiles" that could be arranged, resized, and stacked on each page. This tile system allowed for more creative layouts but also introduced a key limitation: presentations created in Tome could not be exported to standard formats like PowerPoint (.pptx) or presented in traditional slideshow mode. Content was designed to be scrolled rather than flipped through slide by slide.
The tile system supported drag-and-drop interaction, making it possible to embed various types of content within a single page. Each tile could contain text, images, videos, embedded websites, or third-party integrations.
Tome supported live embeds from a range of third-party tools, which allowed users to add interactive, real-time content to their presentations.
| Integration | Content Type |
|---|---|
| Figma | Interactive design files and prototypes |
| Airtable | Live database views and tables |
| Miro | Collaborative whiteboards |
| Looker | Data visualizations and dashboards |
| Google Docs | Live document embeds |
| Framer | Web design prototypes |
| Giphy | Animated GIFs |
| Twitter/X | Live tweet embeds |
| YouTube | Video embeds |
All embeds resized automatically without stretching or skewing, and they remained interactive within the presentation. This meant, for example, that a Figma prototype embedded in a Tome page could be clicked and navigated by the viewer.
Tome offered several features that distinguished it from competitors:
During its presentation product phase, Tome offered a tiered pricing model.
| Plan | Price | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Free (Basic) | $0 | Limited AI generations per month, basic templates, Tome branding on outputs |
| Pro | $20/month ($16/month billed annually) | Unlimited AI generation, design tools, 100+ templates, custom branding, PDF export |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | All Pro features plus custom data integration, AI output tuning, admin controls, SSO |
Tome experienced rapid user growth following its public launch in late 2022. The company reached one million users within four months, making it one of the fastest productivity tools to hit that milestone. By July 2023, approximately ten months after the public launch, Tome had grown to over 10 million users. The user base tripled between the February 2023 Series B announcement and March 2023 alone. By the time the founders began pivoting the company in 2024, Tome had accumulated over 20 million registered users.
Most of this growth was organic: the company spent virtually nothing on traditional marketing, relying instead on word-of-mouth sharing, social media virality, and the product's built-in sharing mechanics.
Tome found unexpected traction among younger users, particularly Gen Z, who had not grown up using traditional office productivity tools like PowerPoint. This demographic used Tome in creative and non-traditional ways that went beyond corporate presentations:
Matthew Farrell, a DoorDash driver turned AI artist, became one of the platform's most visible power users. He created educational Tomes about generative AI tools and built a following that included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Doctors also adopted the platform to create visual post-surgery instructions for patients, demonstrating the tool's versatility beyond its intended business use case.
Despite strong user growth, Tome struggled with monetization. The vast majority of its 20 million users were on the free plan. CEO Keith Peiris acknowledged this challenge in April 2024, stating: "It becomes really hard trying to build a consumer product for millions of people and sorting out your own costs when most of them don't pay." The company identified only "a couple thousand sales and marketing leaders" as paying customers among its massive user base.
At one point, the subscription price was $10 per month, later increasing to $20 per month for the Pro plan. Even so, the gap between free users and paying customers posed a fundamental business model challenge.
Tome operated in a competitive landscape of AI-powered presentation and content creation tools. Its main competitors included both established players and other AI-native startups.
| Competitor | Approach | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|
| Gamma (AI) | AI-native presentation, document, and website generation from prompts | Multi-format output (slides, docs, web pages), PowerPoint export, card-based interface |
| Beautiful.ai | AI-assisted slide design with Smart Slide layouts | Automated design enforcement, brand consistency, traditional slide format |
| Microsoft Copilot for PowerPoint | AI features integrated into Microsoft PowerPoint | Deep integration with existing Microsoft 365 ecosystem, familiar interface |
| Canva Magic Design | AI-powered design within Canva's broader design platform | Massive template library, broader design capabilities beyond presentations |
| Google Gemini for Slides | AI features integrated into Google Slides | Integration with Google Workspace, real-time collaboration |
| Prezi AI | AI-enhanced non-linear presentation tool | Zooming user interface, spatial storytelling, presentation recording |
| Pitch | Collaborative presentation software with AI features | Team collaboration focus, brand management tools |
Tome's tile-based, web-first format set it apart creatively but also limited its practical adoption. The inability to export to PowerPoint format was a significant barrier in corporate environments where PowerPoint remained the standard. Competitors like Gamma (AI) offered similar AI generation capabilities while maintaining compatibility with existing presentation ecosystems, which ultimately proved to be a stronger value proposition for business users.
In April 2024, Tome announced a major strategic shift, laying off approximately 20% of its 59-person workforce (about 12 employees). The company eliminated its consumer go-to-market team and product developers focused on free users, replacing them with enterprise sales staff and B2B-focused developers.
The pivot targeted sales and marketing leaders as the company's core customer segment. Peiris explained: "I think the real business is identifying those couple thousand sales and marketing leaders using the product and then selling them something really sophisticated for their whole company."
New enterprise features introduced during this phase included:
On October 15, 2024, Tome announced that it would end its presentation features entirely. The company set a timeline for the transition:
By this point, Tome had repositioned itself as "The AI assistant for sales," focusing on account research, meeting preparation, and sales personalization. The presentation creation capabilities that had attracted 20 million users were fully discontinued.
Several factors drove Tome's departure from the presentation market:
In November 2025, Tome's founders launched Lightfield, a customer relationship management platform built entirely around artificial intelligence. The new product represented a complete departure from both presentations and sales automation, positioning itself as a competitor to Salesforce and HubSpot.
Keith Peiris explained the reasoning behind the second pivot: "To really help people communicate something, anything, we needed more context." The team concluded that effective business communication requires understanding relationships, company dynamics, and ongoing conversations, and that this context is richest in sales and customer-facing roles.
Key characteristics of Lightfield include:
Dan Rose, the Coatue partner who led the original Tome investment, backed the Lightfield pivot as well, commenting: "It takes real guts to pivot, and even more so when the original product is working."
By late 2025, Lightfield had attracted nearly 2,500 companies as customers, including over 100 Y Combinator-backed startups, primarily through word of mouth. More than half of active users were spending over an hour per day in the system.
Despite its relatively short life as a presentation tool, Tome had a notable impact on how people thought about AI-assisted content creation. It was one of the first widely adopted consumer products to combine natural language processing with text-to-image generation in a practical productivity workflow. The platform demonstrated that generative AI could handle not just individual tasks (writing text or generating images) but could orchestrate multiple AI capabilities to produce complete, polished creative outputs from a single prompt.
Tome's rapid growth and subsequent pivot also became a widely studied case in the startup world, illustrating both the explosive potential and the monetization challenges of consumer-facing generative AI products. The company's experience, gaining 20 million users while struggling to convert them into paying customers, became a cautionary tale about the gap between user adoption and sustainable revenue in the AI tools market.
Keith Peiris reflected on this trajectory in a March 2025 post: "We started to build Tome in 2020. 5 years and 25 million users later, it's become clear to us that LLMs are good at starting work, but lack the context required to finish it."
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani found Tome while at Greylock Partners |
| January 2021 | Seed round: $6.3 million led by Greylock Partners |
| September 2021 | Series A: $26 million led by Coatue Management ($175 million valuation) |
| March 2022 | Public launch of the Tome platform with tile-based presentation format |
| November 2022 | Official DALL-E 2 integration announced |
| December 2022 | AI presentation generation feature launches in beta using OpenAI technology |
| February 2023 | Series B: $43 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners ($300 million valuation); one million users reached |
| March 2023 | Document-to-presentation feature launched; user base triples since Series B |
| July 2023 | 10 million users reached; strong Gen Z adoption reported |
| April 2024 | Strategic pivot to enterprise; approximately 20% of staff laid off |
| October 2024 | Announcement of presentation product sunset |
| March 2025 | Presentation features discontinued |
| April 2025 | All presentation data deleted |
| November 2025 | Lightfield (AI-native CRM) publicly launched by Tome's founders |