Tome Adds Key Machine Learning and Engineering Leaders To Shape AI-Powered Communication

Outlier Partners: Sarah Sachs, former generative AI leader at Robinhood, and Archana Sankaranarayanan, former engineering leader at Google Assistant and Netflix, have joined Tome to lead its world-class machine learning and engineering team.

Tome — The AI-powered medium for shaping and sharing ideas, announced today the hire of two key machine learning leaders, 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 lead Tome’s growing ML and engineering team, as the company accelerates building its AI-powered communication platform, trusted by more than 10 million users globally. The leaders join a world-class artificial intelligence team, which includes some of Silicon Valley’s top machine learning engineers, including Ves Stoyanov. Stoyanov, Tome’s head of AI, spent nearly a decade at Meta’s AI research group, where he led teams to create industry-standard pre-training and large language model methods such as RoBERTa, XLM-R, and MultiRay.

Tome’s AI-native medium enables anyone to take the seedling of an idea and develop it into a compelling, multimodal narrative through an intelligent, prompt-powered canvas. Tome is used by millions of professionals at work, such as go-to-market teams and founders, as the faster way to build and iterate on pitches, client and company updates, one-pagers, and more. Freelancers, creatives, government leaders, students, and educators have also embraced Tome as a new way to share ideas.

Its intuitive, innovative medium has captured the enthusiasm of millions of Gen Z users around the world and a new generation of AI-fluent users who are rapidly adopting new, digital-social-native productivity applications. The company’s latest hires will further drive the innovative machine learning and engineering that is making Tome’s platform increasingly refined and personalized.

Sachs, who will lead Tome’s machine learning and infrastructure groups, previously led natural language processing and generative AI at Robinhood, where she built bespoke machine learning solutions to support customer communications at scale. Prior to Robinhood, Sachs served as the first machine learning hire at Marissa Mayer’s Sunshine. Earlier, she worked on personalization and local search at Google. Sachs earned a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and computer science at Brown University, where she researched computer vision.

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At Tome, Sachs will oversee machine learning and infrastructure, including its cutting-edge model-training and systems for powering seamless, high-quality AI experiences for millions of professionals. Sachs will help make Tome increasingly tailored for teams and enterprises by optimizing its data layer, understanding user intent, and integrating with companies’ tech stacks for deeper personalization.

Sankar will oversee Tome’s product engineering organization, focused on building core generative capabilities and natively integrating content from a rich set of connected apps. Her team will explore ways to use AI for interactively translating users’ intent, ideas, and content into highly structured and polished narratives.

Before Tome, Sankar led engineering teams at Google, Netflix, and OpenSea. At Google, Sankar and her team were pivotal in shaping a core aspect of human-bot interactions, defining the tone, character, and personality of the AI-powered Google Assistant, now known as Bard. Partnering closely with Google Brain, her team explored cutting-edge ways AI could enhance the presentation layer for end users. She holds a master’s degree in computer science and human computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.

Sachs and Sankar join while Tome has rapidly honed its AI-powered co-creation capabilities, making its flagship, multimodal narrative creation experience more iterative and practical for everyday work. The company also introduced its own fine-tuned models to power user experiences in October, starting with multimodal page generation, to increase the quality and speed of co-creation.

Tome, which continues to set growth records as one of the fastest-growing companies to 10 million users, has scaled its engineering, product, and design functions to support its platform growth. The 70-person company, headquartered in San Francisco, has been recognized by Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards in the General Excellence and Enterprise categories and was also named one of the top startups on the rise by LinkedIn.

Chief executive officer Keith Peiris and chief product officer Henri Liriani co-founded Tome in 2020. The former Meta product leaders incubated the company with Reid Hoffman, a Tome board member. The company has raised $81 million in funding to date from firms such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, and Greylock.

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