Pod is joining Backstory

Today, I'm proud to share that Pod is joining Backstory.ai.

Backstory (formerly People.ai) is the enterprise revenue-intelligence platform trusted by the best revenue orgs like AMD, OpenAI, and Red Hat.

We started Pod with a simple belief: sellers should spend their time selling, not assembling context. So we built a deal intelligence layer to power human-in-the-loop agents that watch every deal, keep the picture current, and surface what matters before anyone has to ask, so reps, managers, and leaders can act on the right thing at the right time.

Backstory has spent years bringing AI to revenue work for some of the largest sales organizations in the world, including AMD, OpenAI, and Red Hat. Together, we're bringing that vision to revenue teams at a scale neither of us could reach alone.

The news is the easy part to write. The story behind it is the one worth telling.

The gap we set out to close

When we started Pod, we kept seeing the same thing on every revenue team we got close to. The best sellers were surrounded by more information than any generation before them, and still flying blind.

The signal for what to do next in a deal was scattered across a CRM, an inbox, a dozen call recordings, and a calendar, and no one had the time to pull it together. Great reps spent half their day on everything except selling: assembling context before a call, chasing down what happened in an account, updating the CRM so the next person had something to go on. None of that is selling.

The coaching that would have helped lived in a manager's head and showed up once a week, if at all. Deals that looked healthy in the CRM quietly stalled, and no one saw it until it was too late.

One mission that never changed

Our mission was simple, and it never changed: help sellers sell smarter, not just sell more.

Selling smarter means knowing which deal is at risk and why, who to engage next, and where the next hour is best spent, then acting on it in time. Not more dashboards. Not more busywork. Better decisions, earlier.

When the technology caught up

The mission stayed constant. What changed was what was technically possible.

For years, sales technology got better and better at showing you things. CRMs captured the record, conversation tools captured the call, dashboards surfaced the patterns. But visibility was never the hard part. Acting on it was.

Then agentic AI opened up a whole new set of use cases. Software could move from showing you things to doing the work, from answering when asked to working in the background against a goal. It all depends on one thing: the quality of the context the AI reasons over, and in sales that context is scattered by default. Assembling it is the real problem, and it's the one we chose. We came to believe this is how AI gets embedded natively into go-to-market.

The product we built

Pod is a deal intelligence platform with agent orchestration at its core.

An intelligence layer and a context layer unify the deal picture across CRM, email, calendar, and calls. On top of that, configurable, human-in-the-loop agents do the work that used to eat a seller's day: reading sentiment on a deal, recommending which stakeholders to engage, surfacing the patterns behind lost deals, and preparing for the moments that matter most, from meeting prep to deal reviews to buying-committee assessment.

The agents don't wait to be asked. They watch the account, keep the context current, and surface what matters before anyone has to ask, bringing back a recommendation a rep can trust and a manager can act on, with a person in the loop on anything that matters. Agents do agent work. People do people work.

And we built it where sellers already work, inside Salesforce and HubSpot, in the browser, in the tools already open on their screen.

The part I'm proudest of

We've had the opportunity to work with dozens of revenue teams and hundreds of sellers, sales leaders, sales managers, and RevOps professionals. They trusted a small team with their pipeline, told us the truth about what worked and what didn't, and shaped everything good about the product.

And we got to take part in the conversation shaping how AI and agents are reshaping go-to-market, at a moment when that story is still being written. For a small team, that's something I'll always be proud of.

Why Backstory, and why now

It started with a conversation. The first time I sat down with Jason Ambrose, Backstory's CEO, what struck me right away was how clearly we already saw the world the same way: the same read on where revenue work is heading, and the same conviction that agents do the agent work while people do the people work, and that none of it holds up without a strong foundation of context underneath. You don't find alignment like that often, and when you do, you pay attention.

Backstory has been on the forefront of revenue analytics and applying AI to revenue work for years. They serve some of the best sales organizations in the world, including AMD, OpenAI, and Red Hat, giving revenue leaders, operations teams, and executives a clear, trusted picture of what's really happening across their pipeline. Where Pod mostly reached individual sellers and their managers, Backstory reaches revenue operations, leadership, and executives.

Put those together and the same answer can reach a rep getting ready for a call, a manager reviewing pipeline, and an executive looking at the quarter, from one system, on one foundation. That's the vision we've been chasing for four years, now with the reach, the data, and the enterprise footprint to bring it to teams at a scale neither of us could have reached alone.

‍You can read the full announcement from Jason here.([Backstory article URL])

One team, one mission

We're joining Backstory as one team, not a bolt-on. The people who built Pod are going to keep building, now with more reach, more resources, and a partner who sees the mission the same way. Same team, same mission, a bigger stage.

Thank you

To the team who built Pod: you did the kind of work that only happens with deep care and real talent. I couldn't be prouder, and I can't wait to keep building with you.

To our customers: thank you for trusting a small team with the most important thing you have, your pipeline.

To the investors, advisors, and partners who backed the idea before there was much to see: thank you for your trust and your guidance along the way.

We set out to help sellers sell smarter. The mission continues.

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Patrick Monnot
Founder & CEO, Pod

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