Amplify Partners

General Partners Mike Dauber and Lenny Pruss lead the investment team from Menlo Park. Both were founding partners in 2012 and remain the central decision-makers for new commitments. The firm's website and portfolio record indicate a concentrated partnership structure rather than a dispersed committee model.

Amplify sources primarily through the networks of its technical-founder community, which includes over 150 founders across its portfolio. The firm also leverages its Build Team — operators in sales, marketing, and recruiting — who interact with engineering leaders before they launch companies. Portfolio founders frequently cite Amplify as the first institutional call during spinout decisions, as was the case with Temporal's founding team leaving Uber.

Amplify operates as a venture firm with a dedicated Build Team that functions as an embedded operating resource. Rather than informal advisory, the Build Team runs structured, goal-oriented sprints inside portfolio companies on go-to-market, recruiting, design, and content. This makes Amplify's model closer to a platform-enabled VC than a pure capital provider.

Amplify targets the first-check position and has historically led or co-led pre-seed and seed rounds for technical founding teams. The firm's portfolio consistently lists Amplify as the earliest institutional investor, from Datadog and Fastly in 2012 to Gradium and Boltz in 2025. Amplify will follow on in later stages but positions itself as the entry point.

Amplify invests across the AI stack: foundation-model companies (Runway, Luma AI), AI infrastructure and tooling (LangChain, Modal, DatologyAI), and domain-specific AI applications in biology and drug discovery (Chai Discovery, Achira, Infinitopes). The firm does not restrict itself to one layer and has been active in AI since 2018.

Yes. Amplify has backed multiple open-source-first commercial platforms including dbt Labs, Sourcegraph, Chainguard, PostgresML, and Dagster. The firm's developer-marketing content provides detailed guidance on topics such as open-source analytics instrumentation and hiring developer advocates, indicating a deliberate strategy around open-source go-to-market.

Amplify is headquartered in Menlo Park with an additional office in San Francisco. The portfolio is concentrated in US-based companies, with a secondary but consistent presence in European founding teams. The firm's Build Team and community events remain anchored in the Bay Area.