Lightfield, a customer relationship management platform built entirely around artificial intelligence, officially launched to the public this week after a year of quiet development — a bold pivot by a startup that once had 20 million users and $43 million in the bank building something completely different.The San Francisco-based company is positioning itself as a fundamental reimagining of how businesses track and manage customer relationships, abandoning the manual data entry that has defined CRMs for decades in favor of a system that automatically captures, organizes, and acts on customer interactions. With more than 100 early customers already using the platform daily — over half spending more than an hour per day in the system — Lightfield is a direct challenge to the legacy business models of Salesforce and HubSpot, both of which generate billions in annual revenue.”The CRM, categorically, is perhaps the most complex and lowest satisfaction piece of software on Earth,” said Keith Peiris, Lightfield’s co-founder and CEO, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “CRM companies have tens of millions of users, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single one who actually loves the product. That problem is our opportunity.”The general availability announcement marks an unusual inflection point in enterprise software: a company betting that large language models have advanced enough to replace structured databases as the foundation of business-critical systems. It’s a wager that has attracted backing from Coatue Management, which led the company’s Series A when it was still building presentation software under the name Tome.How Tome’s founders abandoned 20 million users to build a CRM from scratchThe story behind Lightfield’s creation reflects both conviction and pragmatism. Tome had achieved significant viral success as an AI-powered presentation platform, gaining millions of users who appreciated its visual design and ease of use. But Peiris said the team concluded that building lasting differentiation in the general-purpose presentation market would prove difficult, even with a working product and real user …
