Tome, an AI-powered platform for creating and sharing ideas, announced the hiring of two important machine learning leaders today: Sachs, former head of natural language processing and generative AI at Robinhood, and Archana Sankaranarayanan, former engineering leader at Google and Netflix.
Sachs and Sankar will oversee Tome’s expanding ML and engineering teams as the firm accelerates the development of its AI-powered communication platform, which is trusted by over 10 million users worldwide. The executives have joined a world-class artificial intelligence team that comprises some of Silicon Valley’s top machine learning engineers, including Ves Stoyanov. Tome’s head of AI, Stoyanov, spent over a decade in Meta’s AI research lab, where he headed teams that developed industry-standard pre-training and large language model methods like RoBERTa, XLM-R, and MultiRay.
Through an intelligent, prompt-powered canvas, Tome’s AI-native medium allows anyone to take a seedling of an idea and turn it into a fascinating, multimodal narrative. Tome is used at work by millions of professionals, including go-to-market teams and founders, to produce and iterate on pitches, client and company updates, one-pagers, and more. Tome has also been welcomed by freelancers, creatives, government officials, students, and educators as a new way to share ideas.
Its intuitive, inventive medium has attracted the attention of millions of Gen Z users worldwide, as well as a new generation of AI-fluent users who are quickly embracing new, digital-social-native productivity tools. The new talents will help to push the unique machine learning and engineering that is refining and personalising Tome’s platform.
Sachs formerly oversaw natural language processing and generative AI at Robinhood, where she built tailored machine learning solutions to enable customer conversations at scale. Sachs was the first machine learning hire at Marissa Mayer’s Sunshine prior to joining Robinhood. She formerly worked at Google on customization and local search. Sachs graduated from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and computer science, where she studied computer vision.
Sachs will be in charge of machine learning and infrastructure at Tome, including the company’s cutting-edge model-training and systems that provide seamless, high-quality AI experiences for millions of professionals. Sachs will contribute to Tome becoming more customised for teams and enterprises by optimising its data layer, understanding user intent, and connecting with firms’ technology stacks for greater personalisation.
Sankar will be in charge of Tome’s product engineering team, which will focus on developing core generative capabilities and natively integrating content from a diverse set of linked apps. Her team will investigate ways to employ artificial intelligence to interactively translate users’ intent, ideas, and content into highly structured and polished narratives.
Sankar formerly headed engineering teams at Google, Netflix, and OpenSea. Sankar and her team at Google were instrumental in establishing a key part of human-bot interactions, defining the tone, character, and personality of the AI-powered Google Assistant, now dubbed Bard. Her team collaborated closely with Google Brain to investigate cutting-edge ways AI may improve the display layer for end users. Carnegie Mellon University awarded her a master’s degree in computer science and human computer interaction.
Sachs and Sankar join Tome at a time when the company has rapidly developed its AI-powered co-creation capabilities, making its flagship, multimodal narrative creation experience more iterative and practical for everyday work. In October, the company also launched its own fine-tuned models to power user experiences, beginning with multimodal page generation to improve the quality and speed of co-creation.
Tome, which is one of the fastest-growing firms with 10 million members, has extended its engineering, product, and design activities to accommodate platform expansion. The 70-person San Francisco-based company has been recognised by Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards in the General Excellence and Enterprise categories, as well as by LinkedIn as one of the top companies on the rise.
Tome was launched in 2020 by chief executive officer Keith Peiris and chief product officer Henri Liriani. The startup was founded by the former Meta product leaders and Reid Hoffman, a Tome board member. To date, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, and Greylock have invested $81 million in the company.