Ask any sales team which software they hate most, and CRM is almost always the answer. Companies spend hundreds of billions on it, yet it remains the most despised tool in the stack. The reason is simple: someone has to manually enter all the data — and that's been true for 40 years.
Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani built Tome to 25 million users, then voluntarily shut it down. After a year in stealth, they launched Lightfield — a CRM where AI extracts data from conversations instead of waiting for humans to type it in.
Why did they walk away from a winning app?
Tome raised $81M from Coatue, Greylock, and Lightspeed, hit a $300M valuation, and made the Forbes AI 50. The kind of thing most founders would keep scaling indefinitely.
But while working with customers, the founders spotted a deeper problem: the real issue was a lack of customer intelligence — sales teams simply didn't know their customers. The root cause? CRM data was always incomplete, because nobody was entering it.
Keith Peiris grew Instagram DM to 500 million MAU at Meta. Henri Liriani was a Facebook Messenger engineer. They rebuilt CRM from scratch around one premise: "Eliminate human data entry from CRM entirely."
Lightfield's core architecture is schema-less. Traditional CRMs predefine columns — Name, Company, Deal Size — and wait for humans to fill them in. Lightfield flips this: it captures all conversations, emails, and call recordings first, then derives structure from those. Fields are created automatically by AI and applied retroactively to historical records. With 95%+ recall accuracy at scale.
"The most important yet most hated category in SaaS" — that's CRM. In an $80B+ market, nobody has fundamentally solved the manual entry problem in 40 years.
— SaaStr, 2026
What actually changes?
Skip the tech jargon. What's the biggest barrier to data quality in any Salesforce or HubSpot deployment? Sales reps don't log calls. They're too busy. It's too tedious. CRM admins spend their energy begging people to fill things in.
| Legacy CRM (Salesforce / HubSpot) | Lightfield | |
|---|---|---|
| Data entry | Manual, human-driven | AI auto-extracts from conversations |
| Data model | Fixed schema (predefined columns) | Schema-less (auto-generated from data) |
| Call recording | Requires separate tool (Gong, etc.) | Built-in call intelligence |
| Meeting prep | Manual research and compilation | AI auto-generates briefings |
| Agent workflows | Limited, add-on cost | Runs from a single prompt |
| Startup pricing | Complex tiers + onboarding fees | $36/user/month |
2,500 companies adopted it in the first three months, including 100+ YC startups. One user revived 40+ stalled opportunities in a single 2-hour session. Power users interact with the platform 400+ times per week — that's not a tool, that's a teammate.
Salesforce and HubSpot can't easily replicate this. Not because of tech limitations. Billions in revenue sit on the assumption that humans will enter data. Changing that assumption at the architecture level is structurally impossible for them.
Why YC founders are flocking to Lightfield
Most recent YC startups aren't using Salesforce or HubSpot. In the founder-led sales phase, an AI teammate with perfect customer memory beats a bloated platform. That's the exact wedge Lightfield is driving into.
How to get started
- Connect your email (5 minutes)
Connect Gmail or Outlook and CRM records start generating from existing conversations automatically. No configuration needed. - Connect calls and meetings
Enable Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams. Meetings are auto-recorded, summarized, and linked to the right contacts. No Gong required. - Launch an AI agent
Run outbound agents with one prompt: "Find 50 companies matching these criteria and draft personalized emails for each." - Query your pipeline in plain English
Ask: "Show me all opportunities with no follow-up in the past two weeks." No SQL, no filter setup. - Choose your plan
Startup plan at $36/user/month (up to 10,000 records). Pro plan at $99/user/month (up to 50,000 records, dedicated CSM included).
Want to go deeper?
SaaStr: Lightfield AI App of the Week The original deep-dive — founders' story, product analysis, early metrics. saastr.com
Lightfield vs HubSpot comparison Feature-by-feature breakdown from Lightfield's own team. lightfield.app
Folk CRM's Lightfield review An honest take from a competitor — great for understanding tradeoffs. folk.app
SaaStr: Which CRM in 2026/2027? The broader agentic CRM landscape, Lightfield included. saastr.com
Lightfield official site Free to start — connect your email and see live records in minutes. lightfield.app
VentureBeat: Why Tome's founders pivoted Full backstory on walking away from 25M users. venturebeat.com
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