Backstory (formerly People.ai)
People.ai renamed: activity capture that answers deal and forecast questions
Overview
Backstory, called People.ai until April 2026, captures sellers' emails, calls and meetings automatically, matches them to CRM accounts and deals, and answers questions about deal risk, pipeline and forecasts. Answers reach teams in Salesforce, Slack and AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot through an MCP server. It is sold to large B2B sales organisations by quote.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
What you can produce with Backstory (formerly People.ai)
- Emails, calls and meetings captured automatically and matched to CRM accounts, opportunities and contacts
- Deal-risk and pipeline-health answers showing which deals are likely to slip and why
- Account coverage and buying-group mapping from actual engagement
- Forecast inputs grounded in captured activity rather than rep-entered fields
- Answers delivered in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini through the Backstory MCP server
- Situation Search: up to four comparable past deals, with the actions taken and outcomes
Backstory, the former People.ai, still earns its place on automatic activity capture: reps stop hand-logging, and the CRM finally reflects who was emailed, called and met on each deal. The April 2026 rename came with a sharper pitch, answers about deal risk and forecasts delivered inside Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or Salesforce through an MCP server, plus Situation Search, which surfaces comparable past deals from the company's own history.
Pricing is quote-only, built on a fee per connected customer-facing person plus pooled answer consumption, with free access for viewers. Right for large Salesforce- or Dynamics-centred sales organisations; overkill for small teams.
What we found
Backstory is the new name of People.ai, the San Francisco revenue-intelligence company started by Oleg Rogynskyy. A press release dated 15 April 2026, posted to the company newsroom on 21 April, announced the change; people.ai now redirects to backstory.ai, and the legal entity named on the site is still People.ai, Inc., trading as Backstory. The company says product and team are unchanged. Jason Ambrose is chief executive, with Rogynskyy on the board.
The core is automatic activity capture. Backstory ingests sellers' emails, calls and meetings, matches them to accounts, opportunities and contacts in Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle, and turns that record into answers about deal risk, pipeline health, account coverage and forecasts. The 2026 emphasis is on delivering those answers through an MCP server inside Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini rather than in Backstory's own dashboards. Situation Search, launched in July 2026, takes a description of a stuck deal and returns up to four comparable deals from the company's own history, with what the team did and how each ended. The vendor says most teams go live in two to four weeks.
Pricing changed shape with the rebrand. There are no feature tiers: a platform fee is charged for each connected customer-facing person, and answers draw on a consumption allowance pooled across the organisation, so managers, finance and operations staff need no seat. Overuse is not back-billed; the allowance is resized at renewal. No figures are published. Vendr, a software procurement marketplace, showed a median of $24,480 a year across 48 purchases when read on 14 October 2026.
The funding is older: a $100 million Series D in August 2021 at a $1.1 billion valuation, co-led by Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Capital. Customers the company names include AVEVA, TransUnion and Red Hat. It is built for large, CRM-heavy sales organisations; small teams will find it more than they need.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Backstory (formerly People.ai)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Backstory (formerly People.ai) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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