Tome, a fairly young AI-powered storytelling tool that lets users design and publish slideshows, has reached 10 million users, the startup announced in a tweet on Wednesday. This comes just four months after the AI startup raised $43 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $300 million. Around the end of March this year, Tome had tripled its userbase to 3 million users in a month. In just four months, it has more than tripled again.
The tool lets users create slideshows and more with simple prompts and then make changes in copy and images also using AI with simple commands. It is available as a freemium product with the majority of the users using free version. The startup currently has just one paid tier at $10 per month.
In their own words, Tome is a new medium for shaping & sharing ideas. It helps users figure out say how to say whatever they want to say, “without losing the nuance or struggling for hours with design and formatting. Tome isn’t a deck, or a doc, or a splash page. It’s built for the way we communicate today: a fluid, multimedia canvas that lives on the web and looks great on any screen.”
Commenting on reaching 10 million users, Keith Peiris, the co-founder and CEO of Tome, stated, “The need to losslessly communicate what’s in one’s head is a 7.8B person problem that we’ve barely scratched the surface of with technology and design. We’re 0.1% done on growth and 0.1% done on building.”
His co-founder Henri Liriani, commented, “When we launched last year, I hoped it would be used for sharing ideas and day-day work. I didn’t anticipate people creating microsites for their companies, photo shoots, research reports, and cooking tutorials in Tome. It’s inspiring. From here, we’re continuing to make Tome a better AI thought partner. Last week, we made it easier to explore narrative and visual approaches to your idea, one page at a time. Next, we’re adding the ability to reference and research information on your work natively in Tome.”
Both the co-founders have previously worked at Meta companies. Even though Tome has been around for over two and half years, its product actually took off earlier this year after adding generative AI capabilities into it.
The tool has become very popular among the Gen Z who are using it to design different types of visual content.
Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock, was one of the first investors in Tome. He believes that the company is not in direct competition with Microsoft, as most of the content created within the tool would have otherwise been an email, a Facebook post, a Tweet storm, or an event invitation.
He is probably right since Microsoft PowerPoint with generative AI capabilities (Copilot) will not be available as a standalone product. Those interested in using it would need to purchase a subscription for Microsoft 365 first and then opt for the Copilot add-on, which, as we discussed earlier this week, is priced at $30 per user. Furthermore, Copilot will only be accessible to business users, further differentiating its audience and positioning from Tome, despite both products possessing similar capabilities.
He is probably right since Microsoft PowerPoint with generative AI capabilities (aka Copilot) will not be available as a standalone product. Those interested in using it would need to first purchase the subscription for Microsoft 365 and then for Copilot, which as we’ve covered earlier this week, is going priced at $30 per user. Additionally, Microsoft Copilot will only be to business users only anyway. So the two products, in spite of having similar capabilities, will have completely different audience and positioning.
