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, bui...