Backstory has appointed Shilpa Varma as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in an experienced enterprise software and AI engineering leader as the company scales its revenue intelligence platform with enterprise customers.
Varma will lead Backstory’s engineering organization and oversee the company’s technical strategy, architecture, and execution. She will work closely with Sonya Subramaniam, Vice President of Product Management, as Backstory continues developing technology designed to help enterprise sales teams obtain reliable answers from customer and revenue data.
Varma joins Backstory from HubSpot, where she served as Vice President of Software Engineering for Data Hub, Agents, and Automation. Her career spans nearly two decades across Microsoft, Yahoo, ItsOn, Box, and HubSpot, covering major shifts in enterprise technology from telecom networks and cloud computing to artificial intelligence.
At HubSpot, Varma helped launch Data Hub at INBOUND 2025, giving revenue operations and marketing teams a unified view of customer information alongside Data Studio, Data Agents, and Intent Signals. She also developed Agent Builder, which combines rule-based workflows with AI reasoning, and previously led the evolution of HubSpot’s Content Hub from a freemium content management system into a broader content marketing platform with built-in AI agents.
Before HubSpot, Varma served as Vice President And Chief Software Architect At Box, where she helped build cloud-native infrastructure, platform, and data services to FedRAMP High standards. The work supported Box’s expansion into highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and government, experience that Backstory expects to apply as enterprise customers evaluate the security and compliance of systems connected to corporate email and calendars.
Varma’s initial focus at Backstory will be to shape the company’s architecture around three core layers: a data platform to unify customer information, a machine learning platform to identify meaning in that data, and an orchestration platform to take action, with frontier AI models serving as the reasoning layer. She will also establish standards for how Backstory’s engineering organization uses AI internally while maintaining reliability and quality.
Backstory positions itself as a revenue answers platform for enterprise sales organizations. The company says its technology draws on more than a decade of training AI models across billions of sales interactions and is used by sales teams at companies including Red Hat, Five9, Palo Alto Networks, Iron Mountain, TransUnion, and Randstad.
KEY QUOTES:
“Every frontier model has access to the same reasoning. What it doesn’t have is the truth of what’s happening inside a customer’s business. That’s the hard problem we’ve spent more than a decade on, and it’s the one Shilpa has spent her career solving: bringing scattered information together and making it useful to people who just want the right answer. She’s a builder who leads from the code up, she’s seen enough technology cycles to separate what’s real from what’s noise, and she cares about the customer outcome more than the architecture diagram. That’s exactly who we need to run engineering.”
Jason Ambrose, CEO Of Backstory
“Nobody in sales wants to learn their CRM’s object model. They want to ask a question and get the right answer. Client-server gave us systems of record. SaaS gave us systems of action, but it turned sales and marketing teams into data engineers just to act on an insight. AI gives us systems of intelligence, where the system reasons across everything a company knows about its customers. Frontier models are the brain. Backstory has done the hard, unglamorous work of getting the context right, and in a market full of hype, that focus is what drew me here. My job is to make it so seamless that customers never think about what happens behind the scenes. They just do their jobs.”
Shilpa Varma, Chief Technology Officer Of Backstory
