Lightfield raises $47M Series A led by a16z to build AI-native CRM

Lightfield, an AI-native customer relationship management platform, has closed a $47 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The funding positions a company that barely existed in public view a year ago as a serious challenger to legacy CRM giants like Salesforce and HubSpot.

The round also drew participation from Maverick Capital, Coatue, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Audacious Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. Post-funding, Lightfield’s valuation sits at roughly $121 million based on secondary market analysis, and the company has now raised more than $100 million in total across all rounds.

From presentation tool to CRM disruptor

Lightfield’s backstory is one of the more dramatic pivots in recent startup memory. The company was founded in 2020 by Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, both former Meta engineers. Their original product was Tome, an AI-powered presentation tool that attracted somewhere between 20 and 25 million users and hit a $300 million valuation after an $81 million Series B in 2023.

Then they walked away from it. Peiris and Liriani recognized something they believed was a bigger opportunity: the CRM market was still fundamentally broken, built on manual data entry and rigid schemas that hadn’t meaningfully evolved in decades. So they spent a year developing Lightfield in stealth mode, building an entirely new architecture from scratch.

The core idea is deceptively simple. Instead of requiring salespeople to manually log every interaction, update every field, and maintain every pipeline record, Lightfield automatically ingests unstructured data from emails, meetings, and calls. It then transforms that raw information into a dynamic, queryable business model.

Since launching publicly in November 2025, Lightfield has signed up more than 5,000 companies. The platform has found particular traction among high-growth startups that are already operating with AI agents baked into their workflows.

The engagement numbers tell a story

Sign-ups are one thing. Usage is another. According to the company, more than half of its daily active users spend over an hour inside the Lightfield system.

A16z partners Joe Schmidt IV and Alex Rampell have both publicly endorsed the company’s vision, framing Lightfield as the kind of “agent-era” system of record that businesses will need as AI agents become standard participants in commercial workflows.

A crowded but calcified market

The investor roster reinforces the seriousness of the attempt. Several of these investors also participated in earlier funding rounds when the company was still operating as Tome, suggesting a deep relationship with the founding team rather than a bet on a single product cycle.

What to watch from here

The $121 million valuation, while healthy for a Series A, represents a significant markdown from Tome’s $300 million peak. Lightfield essentially needs to prove that its new direction can exceed the traction ceiling of a product that already had tens of millions of users.

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