Summary and Rewrite: People. ai has been creating the AI data foundation for revenue teams since 2016, well before “AI-native” became a popular term. Founded by Oleg Rogynskyy, who emigrated from Ukraine and studied at Boston University, the company developed models trained on billions of sales interactions from emails, meetings, and messages. It has raised $197 million from top investors like ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Lightspeed, achieved a $1. 1 billion valuation, and serves major clients including Red Hat, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon, Zoom, Five9, Snowflake, and IBM. Now led by CEO Jason Ambrose and recognized as a Visionary in Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration, People. ai is evolving from a “revenue intelligence” tool into an “answer platform” for revenue leaders. The Core Problem They Address In 2026, revenue teams face persistent challenges: CRMs are full of stale data rarely updated by reps; conversation intelligence tools log calls but don’t link them to pipelines; forecasts rely on spreadsheets based on gut feelings and incomplete input; and BI dashboards reveal only past performance, not real-time insights. Consequently, leaders can only guess at whether targets will be met. This longstanding issue originates from failing to capture and connect the rich data embedded in emails, calendars, Zoom calls, and Slack messages. People. ai was established to solve precisely this—aggregating and making actionable the vast, yet untapped, activity data. Their early investment in this mission predates the AI boom, GPT, and widespread AI-native discussions. Founder’s Background and Company Origins Oleg Rogynskyy’s experience intimately informed People. ai’s creation. Prior roles included work at Nstein Technologies (an early NLP firm), founding Semantria (the first cloud sentiment analysis API, later sold to Lexalytics), and machine learning at H2O. ai. A pivotal moment in 2007, when his COO paused all selling for a week solely to clean the CRM, underscored the pain of data quality issues in sales. That insight fueled People. ai’s 2016 launch with a $150K angel investment and a thesis: sales activity data is the most valuable enterprise resource, yet no one was capturing it effectively—and AI could unlock its potential. After participating in Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 batch alongside Scale AI and OpenAI, People. ai emerged alongside the modern AI wave. What Distinguishes People. ai Unlike most revenue intelligence tools that expanded from narrow features like call recording (Gong), engagement sequences (Outreach), or forecasting (Clari), People. ai built from the ground up as a data layer. - Automated Activity Capture: Integrating with email, calendar, and conferencing tools, People. ai auto-captures every customer interaction without relying on manual entry. Its patented AI (49 patents granted, 50+ pending) accurately matches activities to accounts, opportunities, and contacts within CRMs, a complex achievement at enterprise scale. - “Answer Platform” Approach: Transitioning from dashboards to delivering precise answers—e. g. , which deals will close this quarter, reasons for losses, or reps needing assistance—based on real activity data, not opinion. This is powered by a vast proprietary dataset spanning nine years, billions of interactions, millions of deals, and 160 million+ business contacts—creating a powerful data moat. - AI-Native Forecasting: Launched in October 2025, this innovative forecasting product uses a bottoms-up approach analyzing deal engagement, velocity, stakeholder involvement, and history at the deal level. It flags risks such as declining engagement and mismatched activity, improving forecast accuracy by 20-30%. - Methodology Enforcement Without Burden: For organizations using sales methodologies like MEDDPICC, People. ai’s AI assesses deal context, pinpoints sellers’ current process stages, and guides next steps—all without forcing reps to fill additional forms. Practical Impact: The Five9 Case Study Five9, a cloud contact center provider, exemplifies People. ai’s impact. Their VP of Sales Efficiency sought a holistic view of activities and objective deal health measures. By implementing People. ai, they saved sellers over 1, 000 hours annually in manual data entry.

More importantly, data analysis uncovered that IT persona involvement directly increased deal sizes—a previously unverified hunch—enabling persona-centric marketing strategies. They also embedded People. ai’s opportunity scorecards in Salesforce, facilitating onboarding through actionable playbooks. This represents transformative business improvement, beyond mere analytics. Leadership Transition: Jason Ambrose In October 2025, Rogynskyy passed CEO duties to Jason Ambrose, formerly head of marketing and strategy. Rogynskyy shifted focus to defense technology, pursuing a pioneering passion. Ambrose emphasizes that customers need timely and precise answers rooted in current business reality, not redundant dashboards. His vision—prioritizing answers over analytics and actions over insights—is shaping People. ai’s roadmap in the emerging agentic AI era. His 2026 forecast for sales leaders highlights a refined human-AI division: humans focus on questions and goals, AI manages answers, actions, and outcomes. Why People. ai Stands Out Three main factors differentiate People. ai: 1. Data Moat: Nine years’ worth of proprietary sales activity data encompassing billions of interactions and over 160 million business contacts form an unmatched activity graph by connecting emails, meetings, calendars, and conferencing to CRM accounts and opportunities—far beyond what call transcripts or engagement tools capture. 2. Proven Accuracy: The key challenge is precisely matching captured activities to correct contacts, deals, and accounts at scale without errors. People. ai has perfected this over nearly a decade. Five9 chose them for superior activity-to-deal matching accuracy—a foundation for trustworthy forecasting, coaching, and pipeline management. 3. Enterprise-Grade Reliability: With clients like Palo Alto Networks, Verizon, Red Hat, Snowflake, and IBM relying on People. ai, the platform meets rigorous security, compliance, integration, and scalability standards. Their Visionary status in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration confirms its production-grade maturity. A Critical Message for Sales Leaders For CROs and VPs of Sales, People. ai addresses persistent CRM data quality and forecasting accuracy problems while revealing what truly happens in deals through real activity rather than rep narratives. Deployment takes 2-4 weeks, integrates email, calendar, and CRM with minimal IT overhead, and grows more intelligent over time tailored to your sales process. Having invested in AI data infrastructure years ahead of competitors, People. ai now possesses the essential asset in the AI agent and autonomous selling age: accurate, contextual ground-truth data of buyer-seller interactions. This is not merely a feature; it is a formidable competitive moat. SaaStr AI App of the Week highlights such AI tools that are not pilots or demos but are fully deployed, operational, and delivering measurable ROI to B2B companies.