Amplify News
6.13.2022
Amplify Partners Fund V

Sarah Catanzaro, Mike Dauber, Sunil Dhaliwal, and Lenny Pruss

We are proud to announce two new funds dedicated to powering the next generation of technical founders: Amplify Partners V, our flagship $400M early-stage fund, and Amplify Select V, a $300M fund designed to support existing Amplify portfolio companies as they grow.

A Venture Capital Firm Dedicated to Technical Founders

Amplify Partners was founded nearly 10 years ago with the deeply-held belief that pioneering technologists, software engineers, data scientists, and AI researchers would fundamentally reshape the world. We bet that the convergence of advances in computer science, data science, and mathematics would create an unprecedented opportunity for those with the vision, and the daring, to build something new.

Our founding premise was simple: design a venture capital firm purpose-built for the new generation of technical company-builders: the engineers, the researchers, the creatives, and other kindred spirits as they tackled foundational challenges in distributed computing, developer tooling, data, machine learning, and cybersecurity. We concluded that a new type of venture firm rooted in intense focus, deep domain expertise, and authentic relationships would win.

The last decade was our chance to put that foundation in place. We’ve built:

  • An investment team consisting of seven obsessive nerds who live and breathe answering the question, “what’s next?” Shout out to the amazing Sarah Catanzaro and Renee Shah on their promotions to General Partner and Partner, respectively.
  • A platform team, dubbed Amplify Build, featuring seven experts in technical sales, recruiting, technical marketing, data, and design who provide hands-on, impactful work for our founders (if you don’t believe me, read the testimonials here; this is not your grandmother’s platform team).
  • A portfolio featuring category-defining companies – some of which have gone the distance, like Datadog and Fastly – and many of which are on their way, like dbt, Temporal, OctoML, SiMa, Hightouch, Hex, Covariant, and dozens more.
  • A community of founders, hackers, academics, and technologists spanning the realms of distributed systems, developer tools, data and analytics, machine learning, and cybersecurity that is as deep as anywhere in the world.

These four elements – our investment team, Amplify Build, portfolio, and community – reinforce one another, creating a virtuous cycle: thesis-driven exploration of technical frontiers, animated by our community, lets us identify people and projects before they’re known quantities. Curated, deep networks help us diligence new opportunities while simultaneously showcasing the support system Amplify has to offer. Once in the portfolio, Amplify’s Build team is uniquely instrumented to support early-stage founders as they systematically de-risk their business. The sum of the parts, in this case, is indeed greater than the whole.

$700M to Support the Next Generation of Technical Founders

We’ve come a long way from our inaugural fund when we first put into practice our vision for a firm dedicated to technical founders.

Our newest funds serve this exact same vision: helping technical founders at the earliest stage of their journey by putting a support system around them to take their ideas, turn those into category-defining products, and turn those into rapidly scaling businesses. Over the years, our funds have grown jointly with our conviction in the opportunity. A larger capital base both speaks to this conviction and empowers us to more fully support founders through the arc of their company’s lifecycle – from seed through IPO.

The progress in recent years has clarified the enormity of the opportunity ahead: the emergence of new architectures, from cloud to edge and sky computing, an abundance of novel applications and interfaces, the coming of age of machine learning and AI, and the promise of Web3. These trends are converging just as the global economy is sprinting towards digital transformation, re-designing old business models and creating new ones entirely.  

Even in the face of a volatile business cycle, we believe that there has never been a better time for founders to build impactful businesses. We’re here to support you.

Thank you!

Finally, today presents an opportunity for us to reflect and celebrate the past ten years, to look to the future but perhaps most importantly, to recognize two groups who have enabled us to build Amplify into what it is today:

First, our Limited Partners. We appreciate your continuing trust in our team and our vision and are deeply grateful for your continued partnership. Thank you.

Second, to the incredible founders who’ve embraced Amplify as part of their journey. Through every trial and triumph, we are inspired by your intelligence, hustle, and sheer determination. You are the reason we exist and we will never take that for granted. Thank you.

We’re as optimistic as ever about what’s on the horizon, and we can’t wait to work with the next generation of founders who can count on our experience, our expertise, and our passion to help realize their vision of the future.

Here’s to the next ten.