24h Inside $5M Silicon Valley AI Startup Building Personal Super Intelligence

In this episode, I go behind the scenes with the team at Tomo, a San Francisco startup building personal AI for everyday life. Tomo lives inside iMessage and is designed to learn what users care about, understand their goals, encourage them to bet on themselves, and keep themselves accountable. Tomo has just come out of stealth and launched Mini Apps, personalised software experiences generated around each user’s goals. Tomo has just announced its $5M seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Conviction, Align, Basis Set, PearVC, and Accel. More than 500,000 people have already used Tomo, exchanging over 100 million messages with the product. Consumer technology is one of the hardest categories to build in. User expectations are high, retention is unforgiving, and distribution is expensive. Despite that, founders Justin Quan and Raymond Chen have spent years pursuing a vision that sits well outside the enterprise AI race dominating Silicon Valley. While much of the conversation around AI has focused on productivity and work, Tomo is exploring a different direction: AI as a companion that helps people pursue goals they genuinely care about. Inside this episode: Why Justin, Raymond and the team spent years building consumer products before finding traction How Tomo works as a personal AI through iMessage The product decisions being made in the weeks before launch Why the team believes accountability is one of the biggest opportunities in AI Inside Tomo’s new Mini Apps and personalised software vision Why building consumer products remains one of the toughest challenges in technology Justin’s advice for founders navigating uncertainty and near-death moments As AI becomes increasingly integrated into everyday life, a new question is emerging: will the defining products be the ones that help us work, or the ones that help us live? Check out Tomo: https://link.willphillips.co/KZxxbv Join my founder newsletter: https://link.willphillips.co/UakLVC Let’s connect: X: https://link.willphillips.co/gWiXUg Instagram: https://link.willphillips.co/izDUfK LinkedIn: https://link.willphillips.co/jXQHWe