The AI Presentation Startup Losing Its Rose-Colored Glasses; Musk’s GPU Dreams

Being a startup founder is hard enough. Add to that the unique obstacles facing the generative AI sector—disappointed buyers, slow revenue growth and the high costs of conversational AI—and many AI founders are realizing that it’s not necessarily the land of free-flowing capital and Nvidia chips.

Take Tome, the Bay Area startup, which uses AI to create and design presentations. It saw viral growth after the launch of its product in September 2022, expanding to 10 million users in just 10 months. Tome began charging for added services in April last year and by August had passed a $2 million annual run rate. Those stats helped it raise $81 million in funding from investors including Coatue Management and Greylock Partners, and even garnered unsolicited offers from VCs at a valuation of up to $600 million last summer, we previously reported.

Since then, however, Tome, like a number of other AI startups, has struggled with internal divisions over the best target market for its product, said current and former employees. While some staffers believed that a presentation tool would be best-suited for enterprise users like salespeople and marketers who made presentations on a daily basis, Tome’s founders initially wanted to emphasize selling to individuals like startup founders and freelancers.