AI presentation maker Tome scores $43M at a $300M valuation

Staring at a blank PowerPoint canvas and wrestling with text boxes has been a universal workplace chore for decades. An AI startup wants to kill that routine for good, and investors are throwing serious cash at it.

AI-powered storytelling platform Tome has raised $43 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Coatue, Greylock, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The fresh capital pushes Tome's valuation to $300 million post-investment, up from $175 million in its 2021 Series A, despite having zero revenue so far.

Beating Slack and Zoom to one million users

Founded by former Meta product managers Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, Tome spent two years building its presentation engine before launching a public beta in September and adding OpenAI models two months later.

Type a short prompt into the prompt bar, such as a pitch deck for a telescope venture, and Tome returns an eight-slide presentation in under sixty seconds. It builds an outline, writes the narrative, structures business models, and generates custom themed artwork from scratch.

That magic trick drove viral adoption. Tome crossed 1 million users just 134 days after launch. According to company research, that makes it the fastest productivity tool to hit that milestone, beating early growth rates of Dropbox, Slack, and Zoom.

Venture capitalists moved just as fast. Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano saw a demo video on Twitter, called the founders on a Thursday night, flew to San Francisco on Friday morning, and handed over a term sheet within days.

Rebuilding presentations for the AI era

Peiris and Liriani started Tome because traditional presentation tools felt hopelessly stuck in the past. PowerPoint originally shipped in 1987, and legacy slide makers still struggle on mobile devices or when users want to embed dynamic assets instead of static screenshots.

Tome ditched static slides for modular tiles that automatically adjust layout and typography as content changes. Under the hood, Tome does not just ping a single model. It coordinates multiple large language models behind the scenes: first generating the overarching structure and tone, then executing smaller queries to write the copy and generate context-aware images.

While users have generated everything from children's stories to design specs, it found its strongest product-market fit as a pitch deck builder. AI meeting notes company Supernormal even raised a funding round using a deck made inside Tome.

Why it matters

For knowledge workers and founders, Tome turns the most painful part of presentation building into a sixty-second kickstart. It will not deliver a final investor-ready masterpiece out of the box, but acting as an automated thought partner completely eliminates the blank canvas anxiety.

Across the industry, this raise shows how quickly generative AI can catapult a stealthy utility into a viral consumer and enterprise hit. But the clock is already ticking. Tome's massive growth will inevitably provoke Microsoft and Google, both of which are already racing to weave their own AI models into PowerPoint and Google Slides.

We think Tome made a smart move by rethinking the canvas into a mobile-friendly, fluid workspace rather than just bolting a chatbot onto old slide templates. Still, commanding a $300 million price tag on zero revenue leaves little room for error. The novelty of one-click presentations is undeniable; turning that into sustainable, paid retention against tech giants will be the real test.