Keith Peiris

Peiris was product lead for messaging and camera AR at Instagram, working on products including Instagram Direct; in 2018 he was head of product at the beauty company Glossier, Inc., and in 2019 head of product at the safety app Citizen, where he redesigned the product, built the product management team from scratch and worked on a large US contact-tracing effort.⁠[1]

Peiris co-founded the AI presentation tool Tome with Henri Liriani and served as its co-founder and CEO. Tome went viral and grew to between 20 million and 25 million users; Coatue ManagementCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry led its Series A, and Coatue senior advisor Dan Rose led the original investment.⁠[1][2][3]

Rather than scaling Tome into a large company, Peiris and Liriani pivoted, shrank the team to a core group of engineers and rebuilt around a problem they had faced while scaling Tome: the lack of an AI-native CRM for growing companies. In November 2025 San Francisco-based Lightfield launched publicly with a product that automatically captures, organizes and acts on customer interactions instead of relying on manual data entry; at launch more than 100 early customers used it daily, over 100 of its customers were Y Combinator companies, and Coatue Management had backed the venture.⁠[2][3]

At the launch Peiris called the CRM “perhaps the most complex and lowest satisfaction piece of software on Earth.”⁠[3]

On September 9, 2026, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry announced that it had led Lightfield’s $47 million Series A. Lightfield’s data model requires no configuration and is built automatically from a company’s emails and calls, a “temporal context graph” captures the reasoning behind each deal, and pricing is tied to work completed and value delivered rather than seats; thousands of companies had adopted it since its late-2025 launch, some switching from SalesforceSalesforceSalesforce is a U.S. enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, providing cloud applications, data platforms and AI agent tools centered on customer relationship management (CRM).Open the full entry, HubSpot and Attio.⁠[2]

On September 16, 2026, a16z released “Why the Next Generation of Enterprise Software Looks Nothing Like Salesforce” (titled “The AI-Native CRM” on the Andreessen Horowitz website), in which a16z general partner Alex RampellAlex RampellAlex Rampell (Alastair Rampell) is an entrepreneur and investor, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and leader of its Apps practice. He co-founded TrialPay and Affirm and serves on the boards of Wise and Rocket Companies.Open the full entry and partner Joe Schmidt spoke with Peiris, with Erik TorenbergErik TorenbergErik Torenberg is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and podcast host who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests and is responsible for marketing and the ecosystem network. He was the first employee of Product Hunt and founded or co-founded On Deck, Village Global, and Turpentine, long combining founder communities, expert content, and early-stage investing.Open the full entry as the show’s host. Peiris described pivoting to Lightfield after concluding that Tome’s underlying technology could not capture enough context about presenters, audiences and their relationships, and discussed Lightfield’s “business world model,” whether AI can replace rigid schemas in traditional software, fragmented and conflicting company data across email, calls and other systems in today’s CRMs, greenfield versus brownfield markets, skeuomorphic interfaces versus natural language, outcome-based pricing in the AI era, a culture of generalists and lessons from a hard pivot.⁠[4][5]

Lightfield: Official website: https://lightfield.app/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]