Tome AI Shut Down: What Happened and What to Use Now

Tome, the AI presentation tool that once produced decks from a single sentence, no longer exists. Type tome.app into a browser today and you get a 404 — checked September 7, 2026. There is no maintenance page, no export portal, no "we've been acquired" banner. The product is simply gone.

Here is what actually happened, what the widely repeated version of the story gets wrong, and what former Tome users should move to.

Tome AI shut down on April 30, 2025

Tome sunset its presentation product on April 30, 2025. The company behind it — founded in 2020 as Magical Tome by Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, both ex-Meta product leads — did not sell the presentation business or hand it to a caretaker. It stopped running it and redirected the remaining team to a different market entirely.

That new company is Lightfield, an AI-native CRM for sales teams. Same legal entity, same founders, a completely different product. As of late 2025 Lightfield had raised $81 million in total across its life as Magical Tome, Tome, and Lightfield, and employed 28 people.

The number that explains the shutdown

Tome did not die from lack of users. It died with more users than it had ever had.

The product hit 1 million users within four months of launch, which its own February 2023 announcement claimed made it the fastest productivity tool ever to reach that mark. That announcement came alongside a $43 million Series B. By early 2024 the user count had reached 20 million. When Peiris later wrote about the decision on LinkedIn, his own framing was blunt: they killed a product used by 25 million people.

Across its life, Tome raised roughly $3.24 of venture capital for every one of the 25 million users it eventually shut off — $81 million in total funding divided by the 25 million figure its own CEO used. That is the whole story in one number. The audience was enormous and the revenue per head was not.

Method: three publicly reported registered-user milestones, plotted in date order. Sources linked above.

Headcount figures are from the Contrary Research memo on Lightfield, which reports the company went from about 70 people to 7 across two rounds of cuts. Published ARR estimates for Tome vary widely between sources and none are company-confirmed, so this table leaves revenue out rather than repeat a number that cannot be checked.

The part almost every "what happened to Tome" article gets wrong

Search for Tome's fate and you will repeatedly read that AngelList acquired Tome. That claim is a case of mistaken identity, and it has propagated through most of the alternative roundups written since.

AngelList did announce an acquisition of a company called Tome, on April 25, 2025 — five days before the presentation product shut down, which is almost certainly why the two got welded together. But read what AngelList actually bought. Their own post describes software that "instantly summarizes term sheets and other key materials for follow-on rounds," to be folded into AngelList's backend for turning financing documents into one-pagers for fund managers. It links to tome.com. That is a legal-AI contract-analysis company.

The presentation Tome was tome.app, incorporated as Magical Tome, and it became Lightfield. Two different companies, one shared name, one confused paper trail.

Method, so you can check it yourself: read the AngelList announcement and note the product described and the domain it links to, then read the Contrary Research memo tracing Magical Tome → Tome → Lightfield under the same founders. The two do not intersect. Nobody acquired the presentation product. It was switched off.

This matters practically, not just pedantically. If you believe AngelList owns Tome's slide technology, you might reasonably expect the decks to resurface somewhere. They will not. Anything you did not export before April 30, 2025 is not recoverable from anyone.

Why a product with 25 million users gets killed

Peiris has been fairly open about the reasoning. In interviews with Contrary Research he described the problem as breadth: users kept arriving, but each new cohort brought its own persona, its own data sources, and its own idea of what a good deck was. Serving all of them well with one horizontal product looked impossible, so the team chose to verticalize instead — and the vertical they picked was sales, not presentations.

The blunt version is that consumer AI slide tools attract enormous free usage and convert badly. Students and solo users generate the traffic; they do not generate the contract values that support a company with a $43 million Series B behind it. Sales software does.

The lesson for anyone choosing an AI presentation tool is not that Tome was badly built — it was very good — but that a tool whose economics do not work will eventually stop existing, and your decks go with it. That is the real risk to price in, and it argues for tools that export to formats you can keep.

What to use instead: ChatSlide

If you came from Tome, the thing you actually miss is the experience of describing an idea and getting a coherent, well-designed narrative back rather than a blank grid of boxes. ChatSlide is built around that same generation-first workflow.

What it adds over what Tome offered:

• Real PPTX and Keynote export. Tome's decks lived inside Tome, which is precisely why the shutdown was so costly for its users. Files you can open in PowerPoint or Keynote cannot be switched off by someone else's pivot.
• Multi-document input. Feed in PDFs, Word files, existing PowerPoints, or a YouTube URL and build from source material rather than from a prompt alone — useful if you are rebuilding decks you lost.
• Presentation-to-video, with AI voice cloning and avatars. Turn a deck into a narrated video, which Tome never shipped.
• A free tier with monthly credits, so you can test a rebuild of an old deck before deciding anything.

There is a fuller side-by-side breakdown on the Tome alternative comparison page, including the features Tome had that any replacement needs to cover.

The short answer

Tome AI shut down its presentation product on April 30, 2025, at roughly 25 million users, after its founders concluded that a horizontal consumer slide tool could not be made into a business. The team pivoted to Lightfield, an AI sales CRM. AngelList's acquisition of "Tome" that same month was a different company. The decks are gone, permanently, and the only useful response is to move to a tool that lets you keep your files in formats you control.

Cover image: generated illustration.