Everyone has been impressed by TypeSafe AI’s Jev — I wanted to see for myself how good it is — and how useful it could be for a product like @lightfld. I started with text understanding, because it is the foundation of everything a decision model does: it has to understand the input, and it has to understand and follow the instructions you give it. The short takeaway: TypeSafe's tiny "Jev" classifier is surprisingly good — roughly on the level of Claude Sonnet on classification tasks, while being a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper to run. I looked at two kinds of work. First, general text understanding: three widely used reading-comprehension and commonsense benchmarks, where Jev performed on par with Opus. Because those may well sit in Jev's training data, I also hand-authored a fresh benchmark over a single random Wikipedia article — every wrong option drawn from the text, so nothing could be memorized. There, Jev landed alongside Sonnet and Opus (it tops CommonsenseQA and MMLU-CF, ties Opus on RACE-H, and is ~150× cheaper and ~10× faster on long-context questions). Then I tried tasks closer to sales and customer relationships. There aren't many good public benchmarks, so I dug up older customer-service and negotiation datasets. On those, Jev is a bit better than Claude Haiku and slightly below Sonnet 5. Big caveat: none of these come from real B2B sales, so the findings are directional rather than a description of what we actually do at @lightfld . Overall, the results look good enough that I think small, inexpensive classification models like Jev will have real uses, including in our own product. Link to the full write-up below.

Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris on killing a product with two million monthly users and rebuilding the CRM from scratch: Lightfield's predecessor was an AI presentation tool growing faster than the team could buy inference to support it. Keith shut it down anyway. Nobody on the team liked the product. Keith decided he wanted to attack the CRM space, a vertical that's notoriously hard to break into. A company's record of its customers is scattered across a whole stack of systems that often contradict each other. His bet is reconciling them into one coherent source of truth, what Lightfield calls a business world model. Every agent a team might run sits downstream of it. In this conversation with a16z's Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt: the office space they traded for their first 10 customers, why a CRM ended up modeled on the Facebook timeline, three attempts at pricing before one worked, and why nobody at a 40-person company has a fixed role. 00:00 Intro 01:24 Why 2 million users wasn't enough 03:36 Why better models wouldn't have fixed it 06:41 Reconciling the data was the real product 08:16 How free rent bought their first 10 customers 10:12 A CRM does 3 jobs and only 1 matters 11:42 Autopilot CRM nobody has to update 14:56 No more rigid data models 17:11 How one customer modeled a whole marketplace 18:48 Taking customers from an incumbent 23:49 How to survive a new head of sales 26:03 Why the CEO still uses a spreadsheet view 30:55 Pricing models that failed before one worked 36:23 Fixed roles make product pivots impossible 40:02 Why slow shipping loses CRM customers 43:17 What Silicon Valley customers are actually worth 46:20 Why buyers need a reference who looks like them 50:40 What to ignore during a pivot YouTube: piped.video/watch?v=K5yGLO8c… @keithpeiris @lightfld @arampell @joeschmidtiv

EXCLUSIVE: AI sales startup Lightfield has raised a $47M Series A funding round led by a16z. CEO Keith Peiris tells me that 5,000 businesses have tried Lightfield's AI CRM, a pivot from presentations app Tome. His goal is bigger: a "business world model" for predicting actions.

Yesterday we announced our series A to reimagine CRM as a business world model. I wanted explain what we mean by that, and why the CRM is the practical place to start building something much larger.

Today we're announcing @lightfld's $47M Series A led by @a16z to reimagine CRM as a world model of a business. For agents to do customer-facing work, they need to understand how your business actually works. Salesforce wasn't designed for this. It was built 20+ years ago for humans to update records. Layer agentic processes on top and you get low quality output, because the underlying data is incomplete and lacks the structure agents need. @lightfld updates itself from every interaction, forming a trustworthy model of your business for people and agents. Since launching last November, 5,000+ companies have signed up - and we're ripping out legacy CRM at mature organizations with hundreds of users. Companies on Lightfield grow faster than their competitors. It finds prospects that look like your best customers and books meetings with them. It captures commitments from every conversation and automates follow-ups. It diagnoses weaknesses in your funnel and learns from your best sellers to codify what works. The companies of the future will run on a business world model, not a Salesforce-era database. Our mission is to put that capability in the hands of every employee, and every agent, at every company.

We're excited to lead Lightfield's $47M Series A. Every company runs on a CRM, and almost no one likes the one they have. @lightfld is the CRM for the agentic era – a data model that needs no configuration, builds itself from your emails and calls in minutes, and fits your business rather than the other way around. Agents do the work that piles up around the record: the updates, the follow-ups, the handoffs, the reporting. Since launching late last year, thousands of companies have adopted Lightfield. Congrats, @keithpeiris, @hliriani, and the Lightfield team! By @joeschmidtiv, @arampell, and @fabrisera2000

Excited to back Lightfield — it’s time to re-imagine how sales and CRM works in the era of AI

Thrilled to partner with Keith, @hliriani, and the entire team at Lightfield! Lightfield's business world model learns from every call, email, and meeting, so you can throw compute at the questions that actually matter. See for yourself at lightfield.app

If I hadn't started Mercury I would have started a new CRM. It was my second best idea and I can't believe Mercury uses SalesForce still! I am excited to back @lightfld to go fulfill my CRM dreams. Congrats Keith + team

Today we're announcing @lightfld's $47M Series A led by @a16z to reimagine CRM as a world model of a business. For agents to do customer-facing work, they need to understand how your business actually works. Salesforce wasn't designed for this. It was built 20+ years ago for humans to update records. Layer agentic processes on top and you get low quality output, because the underlying data is incomplete and lacks the structure agents need. @lightfld updates itself from every interaction, forming a trustworthy model of your business for people and agents. Since launching last November, 5,000+ companies have signed up - and we're ripping out legacy CRM at mature organizations with hundreds of users. Companies on Lightfield grow faster than their competitors. It finds prospects that look like your best customers and books meetings with them. It captures commitments from every conversation and automates follow-ups. It diagnoses weaknesses in your funnel and learns from your best sellers to codify what works. The companies of the future will run on a business world model, not a Salesforce-era database. Our mission is to put that capability in the hands of every employee, and every agent, at every company.

Today we're announcing @lightfld's $47M Series A led by @a16z to reimagine CRM as a world model of a business. For agents to do customer-facing work, they need to understand how your business actually works. Salesforce wasn't designed for this. It was built 20+ years ago for humans to update records. Layer agentic processes on top and you get low quality output, because the underlying data is incomplete and lacks the structure agents need. @lightfld updates itself from every interaction, forming a trustworthy model of your business for people and agents. Since launching last November, 5,000+ companies have signed up - and we're ripping out legacy CRM at mature organizations with hundreds of users. Companies on Lightfield grow faster than their competitors. It finds prospects that look like your best customers and books meetings with them. It captures commitments from every conversation and automates follow-ups. It diagnoses weaknesses in your funnel and learns from your best sellers to codify what works. The companies of the future will run on a business world model, not a Salesforce-era database. Our mission is to put that capability in the hands of every employee, and every agent, at every company.

Today we're announcing @lightfld's $47M Series A led by @a16z to reimagine CRM as a world model of a business. For agents to do customer-facing work, they need to understand how your business actually works. Salesforce wasn't designed for this. It was built 20+ years ago for humans to update records. Layer agentic processes on top and you get low quality output, because the underlying data is incomplete and lacks the structure agents need. @lightfld updates itself from every interaction, forming a trustworthy model of your business for people and agents. Since launching last November, 5,000+ companies have signed up - and we're ripping out legacy CRM at mature organizations with hundreds of users. Companies on Lightfield grow faster than their competitors. It finds prospects that look like your best customers and books meetings with them. It captures commitments from every conversation and automates follow-ups. It diagnoses weaknesses in your funnel and learns from your best sellers to codify what works. The companies of the future will run on a business world model, not a Salesforce-era database. Our mission is to put that capability in the hands of every employee, and every agent, at every company.

Today we're announcing @lightfld's $47M Series A led by @a16z to reimagine CRM as a world model of a business. For agents to do customer-facing work, they need to understand how your business actually works. Salesforce wasn't designed for this. It was built 20+ years ago for humans to update records. Layer agentic processes on top and you get low quality output, because the underlying data is incomplete and lacks the structure agents need. @lightfld updates itself from every interaction, forming a trustworthy model of your business for people and agents. Since launching last November, 5,000+ companies have signed up - and we're ripping out legacy CRM at mature organizations with hundreds of users. Companies on Lightfield grow faster than their competitors. It finds prospects that look like your best customers and books meetings with them. It captures commitments from every conversation and automates follow-ups. It diagnoses weaknesses in your funnel and learns from your best sellers to codify what works. The companies of the future will run on a business world model, not a Salesforce-era database. Our mission is to put that capability in the hands of every employee, and every agent, at every company.