Amplify Partners

Firm Profile

Early-stage venture firm founded 2012 in Menlo Park, CA (additional SF presence), built around a single thesis: the era of the technical founder — that the next generation of generational companies is built by engineers, researchers, scientists and practitioners who have lived a problem “viscerally,” not by traditional business-first entrepreneurs. They describe their target as the “lunatic fringe” of technologists. ^[extracted]

• What they back: infrastructure, data, AI/ML, developer tools, cybersecurity — “technical products for the enterprise” / “technical products for technical buyers.” Added digital biology in 2025. amplifypartners.com/about · LinkedIn
• Stage focus: seed and Series A; explicitly first-check (“first investors,” “meet founders well before they start their companies,” “one thing you’ll never hear from us: ‘it’s just too early.’”). Fund 6 announcement
• Check size: typical ~$1M–$10M, often **~$3M\ast \ast foraseed;smallinitialchecks,thenbackthesamefoundersthroughlaterrounds{.}^{[}single-source](third-partyprofiles;rangesconsistentacrosssourcesbutnotfirm-stated)—recentverifiedseedscluster$5M–$12M (see CSV).
• Funds / vintage (June 2025): $900Macrossthreevehicles\ast \ast —\ast \ast FundVI$400M (core, first-check, early-stage), Fund VI Select $300M\ast \ast (follow-on/scalecapitalforexistingportfolio),\ast \ast AmplifyBio$200M (first dedicated digital-biology fund). Fund 6 announcement · VCWire
• Structure: began as one of the first modern “solo-GP” firms (Sunil Dhaliwal), now a partnership (~9 partners, ~28 staff). Runs an operator “Build Team” (former sales/marketing/recruiting leaders from technical companies) and publishes operator-style essays + the annual AI Engineering Report — positioned as a “technical think tank.” ^[extracted]/^[inferred]
• Notable portfolio: Datadog, Fastly, Splunk (early), dbt Labs, Chainguard, Temporal, Runway, Hightouch, Gremlin, SiMa.ai, Covariant, Determined (→HPE), StackRox (→Red Hat), RelateIQ (→Salesforce). X/AmplifyPartners

Partners

• Mike Dauber — General Partner. B2B-only, “core IP innovation at the center.” Cloud/devops, cyber, AI/ML. Our contact (see his page + the live disagreement on raise size).
• Sunil Dhaliwal — Founder / General Partner. Started the firm in 2012; Dauber’s former boss at Battery Ventures. ^[needs-research]
• Sarah Catanzaro — General Partner (AI/ML, data). Co-led DatologyAI seed with Dauber. ^[single-source]
• Lenny Pruss — General Partner (infra/dev tools). ^[single-source]
• Elliot Hershberg — Partner, digital biology (PhD computational biology, Stanford); hired June 2025 with Amplify Bio. Fund 6 announcement

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals; full pull = Pass 2)

Sketch only; source-tagged rows in seed-market-scan/firms/amplify-partners.csv.

• Arito AI — $6M seed, led by Amplify (Dauber), May 2026. Agentic analytics for finance/revenue teams; Tel Aviv + Palo Alto. Dauber quoted in the announcement. ✅ TechBullion · VentureBeat
• Subtle Computing — $6M seed, Nov 2025, Amplify participated (lead: Entrada Ventures). Voice-first computing, SF/Stanford. ✅ pulse2
• DatologyAI — $11.65M seed, led by Amplify (Catanzaro + Dauber). Data-curation for AI training; Radical, Conviction, Outset, Quiet co-invest. ⚠️ partial (date single-source). [WebSearch/Crunchbase]
• Gradium — ~$70M seed (out of stealth Dec 2025), Amplify participated (leads: FirstMark, Eurazeo). Voice AI research team, Paris. ✅ Gradium LinkedIn
• Avoca — see Cross-check; Amplify is an early (seed) investor; Dauber is the deal partner (later announced $125MSeed\to SeriesBat$1B, May 2026). ⚠️ competitor-adjacent.

Best data channels for this firm

• Firm blog (amplifypartners.com/blog-posts) is the single best source for deal narrative + partner attribution — Amplify writes a detailed “Our investment in X” post and names the partner (e.g. Chainguard seed, Avoca). Dauber’s bylined essays double as thesis primary-source.
• Founder LinkedIn announcement posts reliably name the specific Amplify partner + co-investors (verified for Avoca, Gradium, Subtle).
• Trade press (TechCrunch, VentureBeat, FinSMES, Sifted for EU/IL — Amplify does a lot of Tel Aviv) good for amount/stage/date; partner only in firm post/founder post.
• Codex/aggregators understate role and miss participated rounds (per playbook §5) — corroborate, don’t rely. Crunchbase free is fine for the portfolio spine.
• Amplify is first-check heavy, so SEC Form D (US) can confirm amount/date on the earliest rounds; many deals are Israeli (no SEC trail).

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Profile / fit: Amplify is a near-ideal thesis fit for init.inc — technical founders, infra/AI/agents, first-check, willingness to back at “too early,” operator Build Team for GTM, and a public thesis (“Boring is sexy” / “systems of action” / vertical AI owning a workflow + proprietary data asset) that maps onto init’s AI-MSP wedge. Warm and active via Mike Dauber (status: Follow Up Phase). ⚠️ The live friction is raise size / runway (Mike wants 18–24mo runway; init wants 3–4yr — see his page). ⚠️ Conflict-adjacency flag: Amplify already backs Avoca, an AI front-office for home-services (HVAC/plumbing) — services-economy-AI adjacent to init’s AI-MSP, different buyer/product. Not a hard conflict. Typed fundraise-firm (active), not conflicted.
• Conversation log: firm-level touchpoints are all via Dauber — see Mike Dauber conversation log (newest first).
  • 2026-05-27 — Amplify PASSED this round (Sazzad + Mike Dauber + David Beyer meeting, ~30min). Mike’s pass = crowded-market + channel-CAC objection (not technology); recommended “side door / different wedge” and floated MSP-rollup model (Treeline/Thrive pattern). Door open for future rounds and as an intellectual sounding-board (“I’m a big fan of yours, keep me posted”). Status: Passed (Follow-Up-Phase → relationship-warm; not Lost in Accel/FF sense). Detail + Sazzad’s pushback + re-touch posture on Mike Dauber page.
  • 2026-05-26 → 5/27: Meeting confirmed for Wed 5/27 11am (raise-day kickoff). Re-frame raise size to ~$7M (per Lightspeed-partner-round self-note). Address open momentum-over-runway thread that stalled 5/7.
• Mutual connections / warm path: intro/relationship is Sazzad direct to Dauber. Possible portfolio-founder warm paths into the firm (e.g. an Avoca-founder path) exist in principle but are unconfirmed — see Dauber page. ^[inferred]
• Personal & rapport notes (firm-level): Amplify culture is engineer-first, thesis-driven, essay-publishing; they prize “core IP innovation at the center” and non-consensus “outlier” bets (Origins podcast w/ Dhaliwal + Dauber). Their published language: systems of action, proprietary data asset, owning the first mile.
• Live stage: tracked in the CRM (Google Sheet) — not duplicated here.

Cross-check vs existing wiki

• ⚠️ Amplify already appears in the wiki as an investor in Avoca — entities/avoca.md lists “Amplify Partners” among Avoca’s investors, and synthesis/research-avoca-ai.md notes “YC/Amplify/Nexus backing.” This research confirms and sharpens that: the Amplify deal partner on Avoca is Mike Dauber (named with Grace Ge in the founders’ announcement; Dauber authored Amplify’s “Boring is sexy” Avoca thesis post). This is the single most important reconciliation: our fundraise contact at Amplify is the same partner who backs a competitor-adjacent company. Agreement with existing pages on the fact of Amplify↔Avoca; this research adds the partner-level attribution. No contradictions found.
• No prior mention of “Dauber” anywhere in the vault before this page (grep clean).

Related

Mike Dauber · Avoca (Amplify portfolio; competitor-adjacent) · research-avoca-ai · research-ravenna-competitor (vertical-AI / systems-of-record framing parallels)

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Exhaustive pre-seed/seed pull for the Nov 2024 → May 2026 window. Full source-tagged data: /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/amplify-partners.csv (18 rows = ~10 in-window seed deals + the heavily-flagged Recursive collision + 7 out-of-window reference rows). Triangulated across Amplify’s “Our investment in X” blog posts, trade press, founder/firm announcements, and SEC EDGAR attempts.

In-window seed deals (≈10):

• Led / Co-led: Arito AI ($6M,Ma{y}^{\prime }26,solelead—Dauber),Spiral(Seedofacombined$22M Seed+A, Sep ‘25 — Catanzaro), Datum ($10M,De{c}^{\prime }25—Dhaliwal),Moonbounce/Clavata($12M, Apr ‘26, co-led w/ StepStone — Pruss), Axiom Bio ($15M, Apr ‘25, co-led w/ Dimension+Zetta — Dhaliwal).
• Participated (not lead): Achira ($33M/€31.54M,Fe{b}^{\prime }25—Dimensionled;digital-bio),SubtleComputing($6M, Nov ‘25 — Entrada led), Gradium (~$70M/€60M,De{c}^{\prime }25—FirstMark/Eurazeoled;Paris),Cubist($7M, Jun ‘25 — Polychain led; web3 security).
• ⚠️ Recursive Super Intelligence (May ‘26): unresolved same-name collision with Richard Socher’s $650M “Recursive Superintelligence” — could not confirm company-identity OR stage; see COULDN’T-GET. Not counted as a clean seed.

1. Seed lead-rate ≈ 50%, but the firm’s blog-posted deals skew lead/co-led. Of ~9 resolvable in-window seeds, Amplify led or co-led ~5 (Arito, Spiral, Datum, Moonbounce, Axiom) and participated in ~4 (Achira, Subtle, Gradium, Cubist). Crucially, every deal Amplify wrote an “Our investment in X” post for, it led or co-led — the blog is a near-perfect lead-signal filter; participated rounds surface only via founder/press announcements, never the Amplify blog. This is the firm-specific corollary to playbook pitfall #3.

2. Check/stage: Amplify-led seeds cluster ~$6M–$15M (Arito $6M,Datum$10M, Moonbounce $12M,Axiom$15M); participated rounds run larger because Amplify rides a bigger lead’s round ($33M–$70M). Consistent with the firm-stated “first check, small initial” model. The earlier “~$3Mtypical"sketchisnow\ast \ast outdatedfor2025-26vintage—currentAmplify-ledseedsare$6M–$15M.** ^[extracted]

3. Cadence ≈ one seed every ~5-7 weeks (announced). In-window announced deals span Feb ‘25 → May ‘26, ~10 over ~16 months — but the 2024 Lookback explicitly says “most of the investments we made this year are still in stealth,” so true cadence is materially higher than the announced rate (recall gap, not a real gap). Expect the public list to undercount.

4. Sector mix: AI/data-infra dominant, with a new digital-bio leg. Infra/data: Spiral, Datum (data + network infra). AI/ML & agents: Arito (agentic analytics), Moonbounce (AI control/moderation), Gradium (audio AI), Subtle (voice computing), the Recursive AI-lab bet. Dev-tools/security: Cubist (web3 security dev-tools). Digital biology (new, via Amplify Bio’s $200M fund, June 2025): Axiom, Achira — both AI-for-drug-discovery, both participated/co-led alongside Dimension Capital. Rough split: AI/agents ~40%, infra/data ~25%, digital-bio ~20%, devtools/security ~15%.

5. Partner attribution maps cleanly to sector (blog bylines are reliable): Mike Dauber → enterprise/agents + cyber (Arito, Avoca, Chainguard). Sarah Catanzaro → data/AI infra (Spiral, DatologyAI). Sunil Dhaliwal (founder) → infra + digital-bio (Datum, Axiom). Lenny Pruss → AI/dev-infra (Moonbounce, w/ Rebecca Dodd of the Build Team). Rohan Virani → frontier-AI (Recursive). Grace Ge → vertical AI (co-authored the Avoca “Boring is sexy” thesis w/ Dauber). David Beyer → data/crypto-infra (Allium, just pre-window).

6. ⚠️ Conflicts / corrections surfaced:

• DatologyAI is OUT of window — Pass-1 dated it “2026 q1?”; it actually closed Feb 23 2024 ($11.65M, Amplify-led; 3 sources). Corrected to an out-of-window reference row.
• Antithesis: $47Mseed(Fe{b}^{\prime }24,outofwindow)\ast \ast butAmplifyRE-LEDits$30M Series A in Feb ‘25** — a strong “back-through-rounds” conviction signal, though a Series A (out of the seed scope).
• Same-name traps: “Spiral” (data infra, Will Manning) ≠ the 2023 fintech “Spiral”; “Amplify Capital” (a separate firm, seen on ThinkLabs AI) ≠ Amplify Partners — do not conflate.

Best data channel for Amplify (refined): the firm blog amplifypartners.com/blog-posts (“Our investment in X” / “…and our investment in X” posts) is decisively the single most reliable channel — it names the deal partner in the byline and reliably appears for every led/co-led seed, often before trade press. It does NOT cover participated rounds (use founder LinkedIn + trade press for those: CTech/Calcalist for Israeli deals, Endpoints/BioPharmaTrend for Amplify Bio digital-bio, Tech.eu/Sifted for EU). SEC EDGAR full-text search was low-yield here (early-stage entity-name mismatches + filing lag; 0 hits on Datum/Arito/Axiom/Clavata) — deprioritize for Amplify.