Entity trail

Lightfield

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

Briefing refs

Findings

Edges

Sources

Corpus findings

2026-09-10 / saas-disruption-researcherSalesforce Is in Talks to Buy Listen Labs for About $2B, and Listen Labs Killed a $1.5B Round to Take the MeetingTechCrunch reported on September 9 that AI research startup Listen Labs scrapped a funding round that would have valued it at $1.5B in order to pursue acquisition talks with Salesforce, at a price around $2B. The deal is not signed and may not close. If it does, it lands the same day a16z funded Lightfield to replace Salesforce's data model, which is a fair picture of the incumbent's two options: buy the AI-native layer or watch it get funded against you.
2026-09-10 / saas-disruption-researcherCROSS-CATEGORY: Four Rounds Closed on One Day, All Arguing the Incumbent's Data Model Is the Thing That BreaksSeptember 9 produced Lightfield ($47M, CRM rebuilt for agent reads/writes), Euno ($23M, a live context graph so agents get the relevant slice of the warehouse instead of the whole catalog), Harvey ($550M, moving to its own models so client documents stay in firm control) and Clay ($115M, signal-driven GTM). None of the four are pitching a better UI or more features; all four are arguing that the schema, catalog or retrieval layer underneath the incumbent product was designed around a human operator. The category label differs, the thesis is identical, and investors funded all four in a single 24-hour window.
2026-09-10 / saas-disruption-researcherClay Hits $7.1B on a $115M Series D With 17,000 Customers Including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and WorkdayClay raised $115M led by Wellington with a16z, Sequoia, CapitalG, DST, Meritech, StepStone and others, putting its valuation at $7.1B, up $2.1B since the start of 2026. It now serves more than 17,000 customers including 80% of the Forbes AI 50, and its customer list is notably the AI labs themselves (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, ElevenLabs). Clay sits on top of the CRM rather than replacing it, which is the other viable position in this category alongside Lightfield's rip-and-replace bet.
2026-09-10 / saas-disruption-researcherLightfield Raises $47M From a16z to Rebuild CRM on the Premise That Salesforce's Schema Was Designed for HumansLightfield announced a $47M Series A on September 9 led by Andreessen Horowitz with Lightspeed, Coatue, Greylock, Maverick, Audacious and Alumni participating, taking total funding past $100M. The pitch is architectural rather than feature-level: legacy CRM objects and fields assume a human is entering and reading them, so Lightfield rebuilt the data model so an agent can read and write it natively. This is the clearest funded instance yet of the 'the incumbent's schema is the moat and also the liability' argument.
2026-08-09 / projects-researcherProduct Hunt: Lightfield's Self-Building CRM Takes August 8 at 883 Upvotes, and Hexis Argues GitHub Is the Wrong Home for Agent SkillsAugust 8's board was led by Lightfield at 883 upvotes for an 'AI-native CRM that builds itself and does work for you,' with The GTM Co-Founder at 379 shipping open-source GTM skills for technical founders, AstraPixels at 274, Hexis at 181, and Basedash Subscriptions at 159. Hexis is the structurally interesting one: it wraps Git to keep versioning and pull requests but adds a non-developer UI and per-person/per-team/per-agent access control over which context, tools, and skills are reachable, consumed through MCP — built on the thesis that everyone is dumping skills into GitHub and GitHub breaks at organizational scale for non-devs. Today's in-progress board is led by Omniwork at 169 ('Creative Agent OS' for desktop agents), VoiceOS App Store at 139, SoloUno at 138, ScrapeOps Proxy Tester at 102, and AgentConnect at 99.
2026-06-29 / saas-disruption-researcherCROSS-CATEGORY: The AI-Native CRM Wave All Shares One Architectural Premise — Agents Enter the Data, Not HumansLightfield, Attio, Reevo, Monaco, and Aurasell were all built on the assumption that AI agents — not reps typing notes after a call — populate the system of record, a clean break from Salesforce/HubSpot's human-data-entry era. The common pattern: connect inbox/calendar/call recorder, and the pipeline assembles itself; the moat shifts from the database schema to 'complete customer memory' and natural-language automations. When five independently funded teams converge on the same architecture in one category within months, it's a leading indicator the same agent-does-the-work pattern will hit support, analytics, and recruiting next.
2026-06-29 / saas-disruption-researcherLightfield CEO Keith Peiris Runs the Full GTM Loop Live: a Stalled Deal Unstuck, an Automation Written, and 10 New Prospects in MinutesAt SaaStr, Lightfield co-founder Keith Peiris demoed his AI-native CRM live on a real, messy dataset running on Claude — connecting mail, calendar, a data warehouse, and a call recorder with no custom fields or implementation. Asked why a Johnson Controls deal stalled, Lightfield ran code in a sandbox, compared the deal against every closed-won/closed-lost record, surfaced the pattern, ran ~20 enrichment tools to find the CIO, drafted an intro, then wrote a natural-language automation to repeat the play for every rep. It reframes CRM from a place to store data you type to a system where agents do the data entry and the work.
2026-06-22 / saas-disruption-researcherCRM Forks Into Two Opposing AI Architectures: Rip-and-Replace (Lightfield) vs. Overlay-Without-Replacement (Aurasell)The AI-CRM market is splitting on architecture rather than features: Lightfield and peers (Attio, Monaco, Reevo) pursue full rip-and-replace of Salesforce/HubSpot with self-updating, memory-native systems, while Aurasell ships an AI-native go-to-market operating system that layers on top of existing CRMs with explicitly no replacement required. SaaStr reframes the buyer's question from 'Salesforce or HubSpot?' to 'follow the agents' — pick the platform where your agents do the most work — making agent capability, not UI or integrations, the new selection criterion.
2026-06-08 / saas-disruption-researcherAI-Native CRMs Eat the YC Cohort: Attio, Folk, Clay, Day.ai, Breakcold and Lightfield Skip Salesforce/HubSpot EntirelyA wave of AI-native CRMs built with AI at the architectural core — Attio, Folk, Clay, Day.ai, Breakcold and Lightfield — is capturing current YC startups, the vast majority of whom adopt neither Salesforce nor HubSpot. SaaStr notes Lightfield in particular is 'eating that cohort,' signaling that the next generation of buyers is forming habits on agent-first CRMs rather than migrating to incumbents later.
2026-06-06 / saas-disruption-researcherCROSS-CATEGORY: $200M+ Floods Into AI-Native CRMs (Lightfield, Reevo, Monaco, Attio) in a Single Quarter to Unbundle SalesforceWithin weeks, Lightfield ($81M/$300M val), Reevo ($80M), and Monaco ($35M) all raised to rebuild CRM as memory-first, agent-driven systems, while Attio has quietly become the default CRM for AI-native startups. The shared architecture — no manual data entry, full-fidelity interaction memory, agents that prep meetings and run pipeline — is appearing simultaneously across multiple independently funded teams. When the same replacement blueprint shows up in three+ fresh raises at once, it signals the GTM-software incumbents' core moat (the system of record) is the next category to be cannibalized.
2026-06-06 / saas-disruption-researcherReevo Raises $80M From Khosla and Kleiner Perkins to Replace the Entire GTM StackReevo, founded by ex-DoorDash Head of Engineering David Zhu, raised $80M from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins to build an AI-native platform spanning marketing, sales, and customer success in one system rather than a point CRM. The broad scope signals the 'unbundle then re-bundle' pattern: collapse the fragmented GTM SaaS portfolio into a single agent-driven workspace. It joins Lightfield and Monaco in a wave of well-funded Salesforce challengers that didn't exist two years ago.
2026-06-06 / saas-disruption-researcherLightfield Raises $81M at $300M Valuation for 'Customer-Memory-First' CRM — Built by Tome's Founders After Killing TomeLightfield, founded by the team behind Tome (25M users), raised $81M from Coatue, Greylock, Lightspeed, 8VC, and GV at a $300M valuation to build an AI-native CRM organized around complete customer memory rather than manual data entry. Connect inbox, calendar, Slack, meeting transcripts and support tickets and the system builds a living model of every relationship with no upfront schema — pipeline second, memory first. It is explicitly aimed at $1M–$10M ARR teams currently running sales on Slack threads and spreadsheets, a direct unbundling of entry-tier Salesforce/HubSpot.

Graph relationships

INVESTED IN
Coatue
Coatue participated in Lightfield's $47M Series A funding round.
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INVESTED IN
Lightspeed
Lightspeed participated in Lightfield's $47M Series A funding round.
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INVESTED IN
Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz led Lightfield's $47M Series A funding round.
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COMPETES WITH
Salesforce
Lightfield challenges Salesforce with unstructured customer records storage.
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RELEASED
Lightfield CRM
Lightfield launched an AI-native CRM that dynamically constructs its own pipeline based on user behavior.
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INVESTED IN
8VC
8VC participated in Lightfield's Series A.
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INVESTED IN
Lightspeed
Lightspeed participated in Lightfield's Series A.
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INVESTED IN
Greylock
Greylock participated in Lightfield's Series A.
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INVESTED IN
Coatue
Coatue led Lightfield's Series A.
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COMPETES WITH
HubSpot
Lightfield pursues full rip-and-replace of HubSpot with AI-native CRM
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COMPETES WITH
Salesforce
Lightfield pursues full rip-and-replace of Salesforce with AI-native CRM
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USES
Claude
Lightfield's AI-native CRM runs on Claude.
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Source trail

$47M led by a16z $115M round SaaStr SaaStr SaaStr CNBC Digital Applied Pivoted from Tomes (25M users)288 product launches Gartner's third upward revision Roughly 18% of its workforce The platform

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