Backstory, the revenue answers platform for enterprise sales teams, today announced the appointment of Shilpa Varma as Chief Technology Officer. Varma will lead Backstory’s engineering organization and own the company’s technical strategy, architecture and execution, in close partnership with Sonya Subramaniam, VP Product Management.

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Backstory Names Former HubSpot and Box Engineering Leader Shilpa Varma as CTO

Backstory Names Former HubSpot and Box Engineering Leader Shilpa Varma as CTO

Varma joins Backstory from HubSpot, where she was Vice President of Software Engineering for Data Hub, Agents and Automation. Over nearly two decades at Microsoft, Yahoo, ItsOn, Box and HubSpot, she has built platforms for three eras of enterprise technology: telecom networks, the cloud and AI. At Backstory, she will focus on the work that makes answers trustworthy at enterprise scale: capturing what companies and their customers actually say to each other and connecting every signal to the right accounts and opportunities.

“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,” said Jason Ambrose, CEO of Backstory. “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.”

At HubSpot, Varma launched Data Hub at INBOUND 2025, giving revenue operations and marketing teams a unified view of their customer, along with Data Studio, Data Agents and Intent Signals. She also built Agent Builder, which brings workflows and AI agents together by pairing predictable, rule-based automation with the flexibility of AI reasoning. Her takeaway: agents are powerful, but they demand the same rigor as mission-critical systems, including reliability, compliance, observability and human oversight. Before that, as Senior Director of Engineering for Content Hub, she led its evolution from a freemium CMS into a full content marketing platform with built-in AI agents.

As Vice President and Chief Software Architect at Box, Varma built the company’s cloud-native infrastructure, platform and data services to FedRAMP High standards, with security, compliance and auditability designed in from the start. That work opened Box to highly regulated industries including finance, healthcare and government, and it maps directly to Backstory’s enterprise customers, whose security teams scrutinize every system that touches corporate email and calendars.

Earlier, she built a five-nines billing platform for telecom carriers at ItsOn, a cross-service query layer at Yahoo, and core cloud services for Windows Phone at Microsoft.

“Nobody in sales wants to learn their CRM’s object model. They want to ask a question and get the right answer,” said Shilpa Varma. “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.”

Varma will start with a discovery tour across Backstory’s team and customers, guided by a philosophy she describes as listen, learn, lead and land. Her early focus will be shaping Backstory’s architecture around three foundations: a data platform to unify customer data, a machine learning platform to find meaning in it and an orchestration platform to act on it, with frontier models as the reasoning layer on top. In her view, the company that ties those three layers together reliably at enterprise scale is the one that wins. She will also guide how Backstory’s engineering team builds with AI, setting standards that let a small, senior team move faster without sacrificing quality.

About Backstory

Backstory is the leading revenue answers platform for enterprise sales teams. With more than a decade of training AI models on billions of sales interactions, Backstory enables modern sales teams to ask questions and get the right answer in the moment directly within their existing AI workflows. Sales leaders from companies like Red Hat, Five9, Palo Alto Networks, Iron Mountain, TransUnion, Randstad and others rely on Backstory to get trusted answers wrapped in real business context helping them orchestrate deals more effectively and drive revenue.

By connecting every signal to the right accounts and opportunities, Backstory shows teams exactly what is happening and what to do next. Customers across industries including enterprise, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and defense use Backstory to drive trillions in pipeline and revenue.

Recognized by Gartner and Forrester, the Inc. 5000, Y Combinator Top Companies, and the Forbes AI 50, Backstory is based in San Francisco and backed by ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Capital.

Learn more at Backstory.ai and follow us on LinkedIn.

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