The first investor for technical founders
Amplify Partners describes itself in one line: the first investor for technical founders. Founded in 2012 in Menlo Park, California by Sunil Dhaliwal, a former Battery Ventures investor, the firm has spent its entire life backing engineers, researchers and scientists building the next generation of applications, models, tools and infrastructure. That thesis has been remarkably durable — and remarkably lucrative.
Thesis, sectors and stage
Amplify's investment focus is organised around five pillars: developer tools, computing infrastructure, machine learning and AI, data and analytics, and cybersecurity, with a newer push into tech-enabled bio. It is an early-stage firm through and through: the team leads investments from a company's first round through Series A, and stays with founders all the way to IPO. For Indian technical founders building devtools, data infrastructure or ML platforms from Bengaluru, Hyderabad or anywhere else — and targeting US enterprise customers — this is a firm designed precisely for them.
Fund sizes that tell a growth story
The fundraising trajectory shows how the firm's conviction has scaled. Amplify closed its debut fund of $49.1 million in 2014 with SAP Ventures among its limited partners. In 2018, it locked in $200 million for its third fund, as reported by TechCrunch. Then in June 2025, the firm announced $900 million across three new funds: Fund 6, a $400 million core fund for first cheques to technical founders; Fund 6 Select, a $300 million vehicle to keep backing existing portfolio companies as they grow; and Amplify Bio, a $200 million digital-biology fund aimed at founders who, in the firm's words, are "in code as much as they're in the lab". Sizes for the funds raised between 2018 and 2025 were not publicly disclosed.
Notable portfolio and landmark wins
Amplify's portfolio reads like a greatest-hits list of the developer and data eras: Datadog, Fastly, dbt (now part of Fivetran), Temporal, Chainguard, Runway, Modal, Luma, Hightouch, Scribe, Hex, Covariant and PicnicHealth. Datadog and Fastly both reached public markets, and the current crop — Runway in generative media, Chainguard in software supply-chain security, Modal in AI inference infrastructure — sits at the centre of the AI-infrastructure wave.
Partners and founder perks
The partnership is led by general partners Sunil Dhaliwal, Lenny Pruss, Mike Dauber and Sarah Catanzaro, with David Beyer among the early team members. Beyond the partners, Amplify's distinctive founder perk is its Build Team: a hands-on bench of former sales, marketing and recruiting leaders from technical companies who work directly with portfolio founders. For technical founders who can ship product but have never built a go-to-market motion, that support is often the difference between a great prototype and a real company. The firm's explicit mission — turning technical founders into people who can actually lead a startup — is baked into this model.
Why it matters for founders
If you are a technical founder building developer tools, AI infrastructure, data systems or cybersecurity products, Amplify Partners is one of the few seed firms whose entire identity is built around you. With a $400M first-cheque fund and a dedicated Build Team for go-to-market and hiring, they offer deep technical credibility plus the commercial muscle most early-stage infra startups lack. Check whether your stage, sector and geography match their five focus pillars before reaching out.