Lightfield

The pivot

They killed a 25-million-user product to build this one

Before Lightfield, the founders built Tome, an AI presentation tool that grew to 25 million users. They concluded it wasn't the company they wanted to build, cut the team to a core group of engineers, and spent a year in stealth rebuilding around a different problem. “It takes real guts to pivot, and even more so when the original product is working.”

Dan Rose
Coatue

Work model

In person, in San Francisco and Cambridge

In-person, with an HQ in San Francisco and an engineering hub in Cambridge, MA. 18 of 22 open roles are on-site — most at the San Francisco HQ, alongside the founders, with an engineering hub in Cambridge, MA. “Wednesdays work from home” appears across all 22 job descriptions as of 21 Sep 2026.

Unverified · Company statement

The stated ambition, in their own words

“We are building Lightfield to be the most helpful, valuable, and significant company in GTM tech.”

Lightfield
Researched Ashby job description

Team background

Where the team came from

“We previously built Tome, which reached more than 25 million users, and our team brings experience from Llama, Instagram, Google, and Salesforce.”

Lightfield
Ashby job description

Lightfield mark above a glowing horizon against a dark blue background

The mission

The mission is founders

“We exist to help founders build better businesses.” The founding blog post frames the whole product around the founder's journey — day zero, first revenue, scale — and closes: “We're building for founders because we are founders.”

Keith Peiris & Henri Liriani
Co-founders

Engineering philosophy

An engineering philosophy you can quote

“We deliberately avoid premature abstraction. Summaries, fields, and dashboards are derived views—not the source of truth. Reality comes first. Everything else is computed from it.”

Keith Peiris & Henri Liriani
Co-founders

Unverified · Listen · Boardroom Club

Small team, big incumbents

The company's own podcast framing in September 2025: a team of roughly 20 people at the time shipping features faster than companies with 20,000 — and going door-to-door to demo a modern CRM to SMBs.

Building with Lightfield

They run the company on their own product

During development, Lightfield's product team used the CRM itself to analyze customer conversations and pick what to build. “In this sense, Lightfield more than just a sales database, it's a customer intelligence layer.”

Dan Rose
Coatue

Human judgment

Human judgment stays in the loop

“We're building a tool that amplifies human judgment, not one that pretends to replace it entirely.” Customer-facing sends and critical field updates require human approval by design.

Keith Peiris
Co-founder & CEO

Unverified · Early hires

“Founding” is in the job titles

The live board includes Founding Account Executive, Founding Recruiter (Technical and GTM), and Founding Customer Success Manager — hires who get to define the function, not inherit it.

The problem

The problem they picked, in the CEO’s words

“The CRM, categorically, is perhaps the most complex and lowest satisfaction piece of software on Earth” “That problem is our opportunity.”

Keith Peiris
Co-founder & CEO

Lightfield world-model illustration with white grid lines and data points over a blurred blue and green background

How decisions get made

The CEO runs the company on the product

Before a September 2026 interview, Keith Peiris spent the morning “burning” his own startup's tokens, role-playing hiring plans inside Lightfield — what happens to pipeline with 30 early-career reps instead of 10, which customers they'd win, which they'd risk losing.

Infrastructure

Engineering at real scale, in their own req’s words

“Our Postgres fleet serves 5B+ queries a month — roughly 2,500 QPS steady state, with sustained spikes past 25,000 QPS — and database workload more than doubled last month.”

Lightfield
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Staff) req

Unverified · Free desks for feedback

Free desks for feedback.

“Do things that don't scale. When our product was too early, we turned our “dead unicorn” office into a free coworking space for anyone willing to try Lightfield. Free desks for feedback. That's how we got our first real customers and a few months later, those early customers became our loudest advocates - and helped shape what Lightfield is today. Coming soon 👀”

Lightfield
@lightfld

Overview

Featured Jobs

Strategic Finance & Operations

Head of Communications

Growth Operations Lead

Product story

Funding rounds

Team

Lightfield, in their own words