Shapor Naghibzadeh learned the value of a good story in 2009 as a Google sysops engineer. When hackers backed by China set their sights on the search giant as part of an effort dubbed Operation Aurora, he was called into a hastily assembled war room to explain what exactly was going on in the company’s servers.
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.
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-foundedQueryStory, 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. QueryStory is aimed squarely at large enterprises that manage big, proprietary databases; it serves as a platform to unite data analysis and review for users like sales teams or operations managers.
“What we’re doing is bridging that trust gap for AI to give enterprises answers that they can act on,” Naghibzadeh said. “Instead of, you know, like renting human judgment and armies of forward deployed engineers, we productized that.”
Tim Del Bello, a partner at New York Life Ventures, invested in the company. He is also using the platform to replace the work of several people and produce a quarterly business review, which he now hopes will become a real-time dashboard.
“The product was built for people like me: decision-makers seeking the ground truth who need to work with complex, disparate data sources but don’t have a data science or BI team at their disposal, especially when operating in a highly regulated industry,” he told TechCrunch.
This kind of work can be done withco-working toolsbuilt by the frontier labs, but those tools are intentionally limited in their user experiences. Part of the bet that QueryStory is making is that users, especially at large companies, want more transparency, reliability and control as they integrate AI into their workflows.
As an example, an executive at a tech company recently told TechCrunch about querying a company database using Claude Cowork, then asking the model to show him the SQL queries it wrote to make sure they made sense before he sent them off to a data analyst for human review. In QueryStory, those SQL queries surface automatically, and users can flag analyses for human coworkers to review, with those reviews then recorded in the platform.
“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.