Tome is Pitching a $600M Valuation on $2M ARR for Generative AI Presentation Software - But Is it Any Good?

The company raised $43M on a reported $300M valuation in February

The Information is reporting that Tome is asking for a $600 million valuation in a new funding round just five months after it secured a $43 million investment on a reported $300 million valuation. Tome’s generative AI-enabled presentation software is rumored to have reached a $2 million annual revenue run rate.

That’s a healthy valuation of 300 times forward revenue. Given that rumor, I thought I’d crack it open and give Tome’s generative AI features a test drive. First, I will show you the results, and then offer a perspective on the intersection of this software segment and generative AI.

AI-Enabled Presentation Software

You don’t have to use a prompt box to create your presentation. There are templates. You can also add images, videos, and text to slides like other presentation software solutions. However, those features won’t get you a nine-figure valuation on $2 million in annualized revenue. So, I started by trying out some prompts.

My Prompt

Create a report about Tome's new funding round that highlights $2 million annual revenue run rate and a $600 million valuation for the company that uses generative AI to create presentations.

The Result

That’s the slide I received for my prompt. I was expecting something more interesting. Thanks to generative AI, my 31-word prompt was transformed into 81 words of text. Okay! Maybe I wasn’t specific enough. Let’s try a new prompt.

My Second Prompt

Make this page more interesting. Add an image, blue and orange color accents, and a callout box of some sort.

The Result

I waited more than five minutes, and it never offered any options. Let’s try a different template.

My Third Prompt

This page should highlight that Tome's valuation in February 2023 was reported as $300 million and the company is currently looking to raise new funding at $600 million in August 2023. Please include a chart.

You will note I also added more detail such as requesting a chart.

The Result

Other attempts were no more successful, even with more detail. Some of the results were worse. But, maybe that is not Tome’s strength, or I need some training. I looked online at several YouTube videos about using Tome and some of the product materials.

My Fourth Prompt

Create a presentation about...
The generative AI product segments that are attracting the most venture capital funding.

The Result

The title page was nothing to get excited about, but the title for the presentation was not terrible, and Tome generated six content pages plus the title slide and a table of contents. One of the six slides was a conclusion. The best slide was probably the one about Natural Language Processing.

OpenAI has indeed raised over $1 billion because the number is something closer to $13 billion. Grammarly says it has 30 million active users and something closer to $400 million in funding. Again, neither of the statements generated by Tome is technically incorrect, but they are not all that current.

Another slide lists Netflix as a leading company in generative AI-powered recommendation engines, and “another example is Amazon.” Both companies have recommendation engines they use in their services, but they are inappropriate examples for the presentation topic. We can blame that on the LLMs.

You can see the full result here. The best presentation was about Tome, but that may be a canned response.

What Makes for a Good Presentation?

All of the slides in the presentation linked above are similar to the one about NLP. They are text dense. That may make sense if you are using a presentation format to deliver a report. However, they are not very audience friendly and break most of the common rules about effective presentations. It’s as if the default is to create speaker notes and render them on a page alongside an image.

There are many good-looking presentations in the Tome training section. However, given what I have seen, they require you to do most of the creative work and layout design and then add that to the slides. It is hard to understand how this is much better than using ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Jasper for your outline and key messages and then just building the slides yourself. You can also create better images yourself that are in context with the content by using Midjourney or Bing Create. What do you think about the image from slide seven below?

You can create a presentation in seconds using Tome. I’m just not sure the result will be a presentation you really want to give, or if anyone will want to sit through it.

Prospects for Generative AI Presentation Makers

I think that generative AI has much to offer in presentation development, even if Tome’s current instantiation is lacking. Maybe Tome can level up the features and quality, but what they’ve done is trivial for a company like Microsoft or Canva to replicate. Of course, neither company would implement it in the same way because the user experience would severely undermine their brand reputation.

More importantly, many previous Synthedia posts have distinguished between generative AI products and features. Generative AI seems like it is destined to become a feature of existing products as opposed to the basis of a new presentation software package. Tome’s founders may have lofty aspirations, but this is not a great product today. Unless you can show me how I am “doing it wrong” with Tome, I’m inclined to call this another generative AI fail.

What do you think? Do I have this wrong? Is Tome really amazing and I just need to uplevel my skills? Let me know in the comments.