Shapor Naghibzadeh spent 2009 inside a Google war room, tracing Chinese hackers through the company’s servers during Operation Aurora. That experience taught him something that’s stayed with him for 16 years: verified knowledge is expensive, slow, and usually requires an army of specialists. He’s betting large language models can change that equation.
His new startup, QueryStory, emerged from stealth today with a $6 million seed round from Brightmind Partners and New York Life Ventures at a $60 million valuation. The pitch is straightforward — give enterprises a platform where AI agents can query databases, produce dashboards, and most importantly, show their work. Every SQL query surfaces automatically. Every analysis carries a confidence indicator explaining why the model believes what it believes. Users can flag outputs for human review, and those reviews get recorded in the platform. It’s a direct response to what Naghibzadeh calls a growing problem: when thousands of employees connect company data to a chat UI, “you get hundreds or thousands of people within an organization all asking their questions and getting their version of the truth.”
The target customer is the decision-maker without a data science team — someone like Tim Del Bello, the New York Life Ventures managing director who led the investment. Del Bello says they’re already using QueryStory to replace several people who previously produced a quarterly business review, and he wants to turn that into a real-time dashboard. In a demo, the platform turned a space activity database into sophisticated visualizations in hours, a project that once took weeks with a developer.
QueryStory is model-agnostic for now, leaning on frontier lab models while competing with those same labs on product. That’s an awkward position, but Naghibzadeh’s argument is that durability matters more than raw capability. Brightmind’s Tayler Sipperly puts it bluntly: “AI is more brittle than people realize when it comes to building things that have to be durable and have large-scale businesses relying upon them.” The question is whether enterprises will pay for transparency when the frontier labs keep making their own tools easier to use. QueryStory’s 2025 seed round suggests some investors think they will.
