companies

Backstory

Revenue intelligence platform, formerly People.ai, that captures rep activity automatically and answers deal-health and pipeline questions for RevOps.

Backstory was founded in San Francisco in 2016 by Oleg Rogynskyy under the name People.ai, built around a simple problem: reps and managers were spending hours a week manually logging emails, calls, and meetings into Salesforce just to keep pipeline data current. The company built AI models that automatically capture and match that activity to CRM records without manual entry, then layered analytics on top to show which deals and accounts were actually getting worked. In April 2026 the company renamed itself Backstory, repositioning around a specific use case: letting revenue leaders ask a plain-language question about any deal, such as why it stalled or who's actually engaged, and get an answer synthesized from years of captured activity, CRM data, and call history rather than digging through notes themselves. The underlying activity-capture and pipeline-health engine is the same one People.ai spent nearly a decade building. Backstory has raised close to $200 million, including a $100 million Series D in 2021 that valued the company at roughly $1.1 billion, with investors including Y Combinator, ICONIQ Growth, and Akkadian Ventures. Enterprise customers cited by the company include Red Hat, Five9, and Palo Alto Networks. Oleg Rogynskyy remains Founder and CEO.

Founded

2016

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications