Backstory Named a Major Player in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Revenue Orchestration Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Assessment evaluates vendors on current capabilities and on how well each vendor’s strategy aligns with what enterprise customers will require over the next three to five years

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backstory, the Revenue Answers Platform for sales teams (formerly known as People.ai), today announced it has been named a Major Player the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Revenue Orchestration Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc #US54121526, September 2026).

Backstory captures signals automatically from email, calls, meetings, CRM records, intent data, and news, then applies revenue-specific reasoning to answer the questions revenue leaders ask in every pipeline review and forecast call, such as whether momentum is breaking or where a deal’s risk is building. Rather than asking reps to change how they work, the platform captures activity passively and surfaces answers directly inside Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and the other tools revenue teams already use. Through open APIs and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration, those answers are also available to the AI assistants and agent workflows teams are adopting, with Backstory serving as the expert knowledge layer that provides the proprietary deal context generic AI models cannot.

“CROs walk into forecast calls with a dozen systems and still are unable to answer whether or not a deal is real,” said Jason Ambrose, CEO of Backstory. “We built Backstory so the answer arrives clearly and with evidence behind it; when a leader asks why a deal is at risk, the platform shows the underlying activity that supports the call, and that traceability is what earns trust at the executive level.”

To sign up for a demo of Backstory, please visit: https://www.backstory.ai/get-demo.

About Backstory

Backstory is the leading AI answers platform for 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.

About IDC MarketScape

IDC MarketScape vendor assessment model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of IT and telecommunications vendors can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective vendors.