a16z leads a $47m Series A for Lightfield, the CRM that used to be a slides app
Keith Peiris's company pivoted from Tome to a CRM that builds its data model from your email and calls. Five thousand businesses have tried it. The pitch is not a better Salesforce. It is a record that agents can read.
Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $47 million Series A in Lightfield, the AI-native CRM built by Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, the founders of the presentations app Tome. Alex Konrad reported the round on Wednesday morning; a16z's Joe Schmidt, Alex Rampell and Fabri Sera confirmed it an hour later. Peiris told Konrad that 5,000 businesses have tried the product. a16z's version is that "thousands of companies have adopted Lightfield" since a launch late last year.
We're excited to lead Lightfield's $47M Series A.
Every company runs on a CRM, and almost no one likes the one they have.
@lightfld is the CRM for the agentic era – a data model that needs no configuration, builds itself from your emails and calls in minutes, and fits your business rather than the other way around. Agents do the work that piles up around the record: the updates, the follow-ups, the handoffs, the reporting.
Since launching late last year, thousands of companies have adopted Lightfield.
Congrats, @keithpeiris, @hliriani, and the Lightfield team!
By @joeschmidtiv, @arampell, and @fabrisera2000
Lightfield's pitch, in a16z's words, is "a data model that needs no configuration, builds itself from your emails and calls in minutes, and fits your business rather than the other way around. Agents do the work that piles up around the record: the updates, the follow-ups, the handoffs, the reporting." Every record is exposed through an API, MCP and a CLI. Peiris's stated ambition is bigger than sales software: a "business world model" for predicting actions.
Why a CRM, and why now
The CRM is the oldest category in SaaS and the one with the unhappiest tenants. a16z puts it bluntly. "Every company runs on a CRM, and almost no one likes the one they have." The historical reason is simple. A CRM is a database that only has value if humans keep it updated, and humans don't. Agents change the economics in both directions. They can do the updating, and they need a record to work from that isn't somebody's memory.
Rohan Paul put the test well. "Can someone take over an account without asking the previous owner to explain everything? I'd ask the same question about an AI agent." Automate the work without fixing the handoff and you have kept the handoff problem, now at machine speed.
Neither valuation nor total funding was disclosed. Tome raised venture money as a presentations product before the pivot; a16z's announcement does not mention Tome.
Our read
This is a well-timed bet on the least glamorous consequence of agents: they need somewhere to write things down that other agents can read. The claim we'd want to test is the self-building data model. Every CRM in history has promised zero configuration, and every deployment has ended with a consultant. Building the schema from email and call transcripts is plausible now in a way it wasn't in 2022, and exposing records over MCP and a CLI means the company is designing for agent customers, not only human ones.
The number that matters isn't 5,000 trials. It's how many of them are still writing to Lightfield a year from now with no human in the loop. The Tome pivot is, oddly, a point in favour, because Peiris has already watched one category get flattened by a model release and moved before it hit.
Who should worry? HubSpot's low end, and every "AI features" add-on being sold to existing CRM tenants, because a record that builds itself is a different product from a record with a chatbot on top. We'd expect Lightfield to announce a $100 million-plus round at more than $1 billion by the end of 2027, and Salesforce to ship a "zero-configuration" object mode first. If a year from now the company still describes adoption in trials rather than seats, the schema didn't build itself.