The board room erupted in excited applause as the pitch presentation finished.
“GPT Ventures is prepared to invest a billion, at a minimum,” remarked the gray-haired investor grinning at the back. “So don’t take these questions the wrong way — we’re just doing our due diligence here.”
Holden had founded his company, DreamI/O, five years ago, and had already led it to wild success as CEO. By the early 2030s highly optimized recommender engines and LLM-driven hyper-personalization models had made competition in attention markets nearly impossible. There were simply no glimmers of attention left to monetize until DreamI/O’s revolutionary first product, the DreamScape, established a new source.
Building on advances in spatial and immersive computing from the mid 2020’s Holden had helped develop a proprietary and cheap eye mask — the DreamScape — that could deliver content (and, more lucratively, ads) during sleep. A panel of twenty-five million “Scapers”, earned a small but enticing enough cut of the ad revenue for everything shown to them while snoozing. And they woke up feeling mostly rested.
But while the ad business was booming on their DreamAds platform, the pharma R&D needed to take the company to the next level was not cheap. Holden was going to need several billion more to roll it out and scale up.
“So, when will the FDA approve the pill?” inquired the investor, “and how soon can you scale up the user panel after that?”
“The trials are done and they show it’s mostly safe. Approvals should come within a few months as our lobbyists smooth over any misunderstandings with the agency,” Holden responded. “The marketing name will be Vocaze, which tests well with our users. And we’re already ramping up production and packaging in India. We can be recruiting and distributing doses within a month of approval, scaling to one million by the end of year one, and ten million by year two,” he added. “We’ll get to the whole panel by year three.”
“That’s the kind of growth we like to see,” remarked the investor. “Can you say more about your ongoing revenue stream from operations too?”
“Sure, we’ll have some incremental growth in the interim as we scale up. After running DreamAds for almost five years we’ve collected tons of data on the user experience,” Holden began. “About a third of our users are interested in a REM opt-out package. By detecting and scheduling ads outside of the user’s REM sleep cycle, our internal studies have shown a better, more restful experience. These users are willing to accept a considerably lower payout on their sleep attention and we only need to drop ad displays by a small amount. This should grow revenue year-over-year by at least 20%.”
“Not bad, any other plans?” asked the investor.
“Well, to boost baseline growth, we’re also planning to invest some of the returns from the REM opt-out plan towards offering subsidized DreamScape masks based on geotargeting. We’ve found that there are certain urban zip-codes and neighborhoods where there’s higher tolerance for more ads during sleep, including REM, and we think that’s going to expand the market considerably. These users are also open to financing some or most of the cost of the DreamScape with DreamAd points they accrue. We’re considering branding these as DreamMiles. In five years our target is to have 40 million scapers and the average revenue per scaper boosted by 20–30%.”
“Ok, ok,” said the investor, “So you’ve got a solid path forward on the display and ads revenue side, but can you walk us through the numbers for the new output side of the business again?”
Holden got animated, “Absolutely, this is what I’m most excited about and what we’ve been working towards at DreamI/O for the last four years. As you know, human-produced data for GPT models dried up around 2030 with the training of GPT-7.”
“GPT Ventures knows all too well that the whole industry has been going in circles for the last few years. This is why we’re so interested in taking the next step with you,” explained the investor.
“Exactly, there just isn’t enough human-sourced data to keep up with what the scaling laws are telling us we need to reach AGI. We think we can grow revenue by a factor of 10x using our proprietary patent-pending and soon-to-be-FDA-approved pill which induces sleep-talk all night long. Since the DreamScape already comes standard with a microphone we estimate that once we scale production and distribute the pill to the full panel we can be generating 20–30 trillion tokens per year. This should be enough to train GPT-8 and beyond!”, Holden exclaimed.
The CEO continued, “We’ll need to increase payouts a bit since sleep talkers can disturb household members, and some of our trial participants wake up with a hoarse voice. But we already have all of the big-8 AI companies lined up to license the data. Not to mention, we can also use the data to optimize revenue on the DreamAds platform through further personalization.”
“This is incredible Holden. We’ll definitely invest. I think we can do the original five billion you asked for. Beyond the obvious domestic AI market, we can also make some introductions to folks abroad who are interested in the sleep talk data for their nation-models.”
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