About Amplify

Believers in Technical Founders

We believe that technical problems are best solved by the people who experience them first hand. Our founders tackle what bothered them and their teams as practitioners. Empathy for your end user is much more powerful when you are your end user.

From the start, Amplify has been working with engineers, professors, researchers, and open source project creators to help turn their bold ideas into beloved products and companies. Long live the technical.
Technologists Turned Founders
Open Source Creators
Professors and Researchers
Technical Practitioners
Maxim Fateev
CEO, Temporal
Open Source Creators
Matt Butcher
CEO, Fermyon
Open Source Creators
Robert Nishihara
CEO, Anyscale
Open Source Creators
Dan Lorenc
CEO, Chainguard
Open Source Creators
Adam Jacob
Co-founder, Chef
Open Source Creators
Tianqi Chen
Chief Technologist, OctoML
Open Source Creators
Pagination
Alana Marzoev
CEO, ReadySet
Professors and Researchers
Ameet Talwalkar
Chief Scientist, Determined AI
Professors and Researchers
Luis Ceze
CEO, OctoML
Professors and Researchers
Peter Chen
CEO, Covariant
Professors and Researchers
Cristóbal Valenzuela
CEO, Runway ML
Professors and Researchers
Vicki Chung
CTO, Gantry
Professors and Researchers
Pagination
Caitlin Colgrove
CTO, Hex and former software engineering leader
Technical Practitioners
Tejas Manohar
Co-CEO, Hightouch and former engineer
Technical Practitioners
Chetan Sharma
CEO, Eppo and former data scientist
Technical Practitioners
Amit Jain
CEO, Luma AI and former computer vision systems engineer
Technical Practitioners
Pagination

Your First and Earliest Partners

Amplify is an early, early stage investor: we meet many of our founders well before they start their companies, or even settle on a product idea. We spend our time bringing together technical folks working on interesting projects, and helping get things off the ground. We lead investments from a company's first round through Series A, and support founders all the way until IPO.

Our Investment Areas

We have rare expertise and passion for the next generation of technical products.
Developer Tools & Computing Infrastructure

It’s hard to think of a better time to be a developer than today: you can get a frontend, a database, and an app server up and running in literally minutes. But at the same time, the apps we’re building are getting a lot more complicated: they’re bigger, they’re integrating real time audio and video, they’re streaming, and they’re relying on data – ML or otherwise – to make decisions. Progress in developer productivity and infra over the past decade has been exciting, but we’re just getting started.

Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

After what feels like a decade of slow but sure progress, ML and AI are finally making it into the mainstream through LLMs, foundation models, and the like. For long time practitioners who have been grinding for years, it’s an exciting time. It seems clear that everything we do and use will have some sort of ML behind it – but less clear how that happens in practice. And to get there, we’ll need a supporting cast of developer tools, data and backend infrastructure, and analytics to emerge.

Data & Analytics

Before Hex, dbt, and Snowflake we had Tableau, Kimball, and Hadoop. The principles of the Modern Data Stack are similar, though: help teams make quick, effective, trustworthy decisions with their data. And yet, 10 or so years into this trend, most data teams will still tell you that they’re not having the impact they’d hoped for. We’re excited about tools and infrastructure that enable data teams to guide decision making, share knowledge, and support better user experiences.

Cybersecurity

As the wave of digitization washes over every industry and the line between the physical and digital world blurs, new attack vectors are leaving businesses more vulnerable than ever. Protecting infrastructure, end-user devices, the software supply chain, and everything in between has never been more pressing for CISOs. With software touching and transforming every part of the enterprise, security can no longer be something organizations bolt-on but needs to be tightly coupled with the entire engineering and IT org. We believe there is a massive opportunity to improve security by integrating best practices and prophylactics directly into developer tooling and the software delivery cycle. New primitives will be necessary to ensure the security of robotics and real-time decisioning systems that live amongst us. Finally, we expect leaps forward in machine learning, cryptography, and advanced threat hunting techniques to drive an innovation cycle for a new class of products that help thwart an ever-growing set of sophisticated attacks and attackers.

Our Values

Integrity
Focus
Relationships