QueryStory wants you to believe what AI is telling

Back Shapor Naghibzadeh learned the value of a good story in 2009 as a Google sysops engineer. When hackers backed Tracing cyberattacks through disparate networks taught Naghibzadeh the value of verified knowledge. But it was a costly and time-consuming task.

He thinks that LLMs can bring that same functionality to databases of all kinds in a fraction of the time. Naghibzadeh would spend the next six years focused on the nexus of data and cybersecurity, using Google’s resources to build tools that allowed security analysts to query complex data.

In 2016, he co-founded a startup in Google’s X Labs called Chronicle that would bring that same functionality to other companies. For related coverage, explore our detailed analysis on Technology and Digital Systems.

Last Year Large Language Updates

Last year, as large language models took a larger role in data analysis, Naghibzadeh saw a new opportunity to take the techniques he developed for cybersecurity and apply them to a variety of analytics. He co-founded QueryStory, where he is CEO, alongside CTO Stanley Yang, a former Google colleague and lead engineer at EvolutionIQ, and CPO David Glusic, an Accenture veteran.

The startup emerged from stealth today. “You get this pattern of an investigation — you ask a bunch of questions of the data, and after you have been able to ask a number of questions, you assemble that together into a narrative,” Naghibzadeh said. “That became the genesis for the name QueryStory.

It’s about telling stories with data, right? Putting a narrative together that’s grounded in truth.” QueryStory raised a $6 million seed round in late 2025 from Brightmind Ventures and New York Life Ventures at a valuation of $60 million, and has spent the intervening time developing and piloting its product with customers.

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“AI is more brittle than people realize when it comes to like building things that have to be durable and have large scale businesses relying upon them,” Tayler Sipperly, a partner at Brightmind Partners, told TechCrunch. Naghibzadeh points out that when companies connect their data to an LLM’s chat UI, “you get hundreds or thousands of people within an organization all asking their questions and getting their version of the truth and putting that in a slide deck and sharing it-you just end up with this huge sprawl of content, and there’s no real place to hang that content that ties back to the data.” There are also economics to contend with.

QueryStory is built to be model-agnostic, although for now it mainly uses the latest models provided While his company competes with frontier labs on a product basis, Naghibzadeh believes that customers will prefer working with a service provider that isn’t incentivized to sell as much intelligence as possible. “We have a lot of things going for us here in not being one of those companies that built their business around this consumption model of compute or storage or tokens,” Naghibzadeh said.

He argues that a purpose-built tool like QueryStory can be more efficient and accurate than a general-purpose agent “The thing that we are selling is the trust in the answers, right?” he said. “The thing that we’re selling them is the value that we’re adding to the business, and our whole goal is giving the CFO the ability to understand ‘what is this thing going to cost?’” When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission.

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