Backstory has appointed Shilpa Varma as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead its engineering organization and guide the technical strategy behind its AI-powered revenue intelligence platform. Announced on October 14, 2026, the appointment comes as the company focuses on helping enterprise sales teams access reliable answers from complex customer and business data.
Varma joins Backstory from HubSpot, where she served as Vice President of Software Engineering for Data Hub, Agents and Automation. Her work included launching Data Hub and Agent Builder, technologies designed to connect customer information and support AI-powered workflows. Before HubSpot, she was Chief Software Architect at Box, helping build cloud infrastructure and data services to meet FedRAMP High security standards.
Her career spans nearly two decades across Microsoft, Yahoo, ItsOn, Box and HubSpot, covering enterprise technology shifts from telecommunications and cloud computing to artificial intelligence. This experience brings together platform engineering, data management, security and AI development capabilities increasingly important as organizations deploy AI across business-critical systems.
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At Backstory, Varma will oversee engineering, technical architecture and execution in close partnership with Sonya Subramaniam, Vice President of Product Management. Her priorities include connecting scattered customer information, applying machine learning to identify meaningful insights, and developing systems that can help teams act on those insights. She will also guide how AI is used within the engineering organization while maintaining reliability and product quality.
Backstory provides a revenue answers platform designed to help enterprise sales teams understand customer interactions and connect information to accounts and opportunities. Its approach addresses a growing challenge in enterprise AI: advanced models can reason over information, but their answers are only useful when the underlying business context is accurate and connected.
Varma’s appointment reflects the increasing importance of strong data foundations in enterprise AI. As companies seek more dependable AI-generated insights, technology leaders must ensure that information is connected, secure and relevant to business decisions. Backstory’s next phase will depend on translating those foundations into trustworthy answers that help sales teams work more effectively.
