Announcing $900M in new capital, our first digital biology fund, and our new look

Today we’re announcing three new funds dedicated to backing early stage technical founders through their whole journey: 

• Fund 6: our $400M core, first check for technical founders fund
• Fund 6 Select: a $300M fund to support existing Amplify companies as they grow
• Amplify Bio: our first-ever dedicated digital bio fund, $200M for founders who are in code as much as they’re in the lab

Amplify is purpose-built from the ground up to back and support technical founders early. Our investors make up the most technical team in all of venture capital; they live and breathe technical products. Our Build Team of former leaders in sales, marketing, and recruiting brings their extensive experience at technical companies to hands-on work with our founders. And our community of 150+ technical founders connects on everything from recruiting engineers to what tool to use for usage-based billing.

But first: we started a firm predicated on backing technical founders 13 years ago. It’s worth reflecting on how drastically things have changed.

An ode to technical founders

Between AI companies growing faster than anything in history and FAANG leading the public markets, it’s safe to say that today, engineers and researchers reign supreme. Their companies and their culture have driven most of the economic progress over the past decade, from Google to Datadog to OpenAI. But it wasn’t always that way. 

Just a short 20 years ago, engineers were far from the celebrated change makers they are today – they were tucked away in a cubicle somewhere writing Assembly. Instead it was business people, credentialed MBAs in crisp dark suits, white shirts, and a passable golf game who were entrusted with the capital and decision making power to build businesses. Engineers built the product, sure. But they didn’t build the business.

Then things started to change. The front lines of IT moved from their unlikely home base – banks and hedge funds on Wall Street – to Silicon Valley. Google, Facebook, and Amazon all became truly  hyperscale in the 2010s, growing to sizes that dwarfed the old guard and, in process, developing a unique set of problems that needed new infrastructure. The story goes that the Facebook infrastructure team met with Oracle and asked them what their largest deployed database was. They said a cluster of a few 250TB DBs (1PB total), to which Facebook replied: that’s cute. Ours is 50PB.

The sheer scale that these so-called internet companies were operating at – 24/7 and completely global – started to uncover a completely new set of unsolved software and infrastructure problems. How do you handle massive production data stores? How do you deploy quickly and safely? How do you build reliable, resilient services when you have hundreds of millions or even billions of users? And how do you monitor it all?

And it was engineers and researchers – technical startup founders – who answered that call. Who better than the people who discovered and experienced these problems themselves first hand to go out and build solutions for them? Datadog, MongoDB, Elastic, Twilio, Hashi…all created in this era, all led by highly technical founding teams, all setting out to solve their own problems. Amplify was lucky enough to get a front seat as the first institutional investors in Datadog and Fastly, more than 10 years ago.

The thing about technical founders is that they are all about the details. When you’re a technical founder building technical products, in some senses your buyer is just like you – you are creating tools for other craftsmen. It is the ultimate test of attention to detail and nuance. Everything counts. These endeavors require a level of excellence and dedication scarcely seen in other areas of software. It’s pretty neat.

Though it’s in vogue in Venture Capital today to back the technical founder, it wasn’t back then. They didn’t look anything like the kinds of people who started companies that made money at the time. They didn’t go to business school. They had never sold software before. They wore Megadeth tees. But over a decade ago, in the midst of all of that, we started Amplify predicated on this one belief: that the script was going to flip, and it was going to become the era of the technical founder.

Amplify has been investing in these technical founders for 13 years now. We’ve backed hundreds of engineers, researchers, and otherwise creative tinkerers who go out and against all odds take a shot at making a product that fellow craftsmen might regard with little more than scorn. We’ve been the first investors in companies like Datadog, Fastly, Chainguard, Temporal, Scribe, dbt, and Runway, companies whose founders felt compelled to solve interesting problems because these problems are their problems.  

Announcing Amplify Bio I

Amplify has been investing in technical founders for 13 years and counting: we’ve partnered with more of them than anyone else on the planet. Which is why it’s exciting not only to announce $700M in funds that allow us to continue doing the same, but also something new: a $200M fund dedicated to backing technical founders in digital biology.

The same thing that happened to infrastructure, data, and developer tools is now starting to happen in biology: as the costs of reading and writing DNA have fallen dramatically, tech and AI are starting to take over. A novel, two dimensional group of technical founders is emerging, blending biology and research backgrounds with deep expertise in programming and AI. They don’t look like the suits who typically run bio companies. But they’re already building the next generation of companies that are going to define this new era, from drug discovery at scale to atomistic foundation simulation models.

Though we haven’t been so loud about it, Amplify has been backing technical founders in bio for over a decade, starting with Recursion ($RXRX) back in 2016. Since then we’ve partnered with incredible founders changing the face of digital biology via Chai Discovery, Axiom, Achira, Bexorg, and Tahoe Therapeutics. And now we’ve got a dedicated fund to find and partner with even more. 

With a new fund also comes new people: we’re psyched to welcome Elliot Hershberg as our newest Partner. With a PhD from Stanford in computational biology, Elliot brings an extraordinary background as both a scientist and investor, with notable past deals including Unnatural Products, Atomic AI, and Digital Biology. He’s also the author of the widely-read "The Century of Biology" newsletter, which we’re happy to report he’ll continue writing.

New funds, same Amplify

13 years is a long time to be focused on a particular type of person. You learn a lot about them. Their strengths and their weaknesses. How they like to work, and communicate. Where they need the most help, and where they like to be left alone. And it’s for this reason that Amplify is built from the ground up for the technical founder:

• Our incredible Investment Team spends 100% of their time with engineers and researchers. They’re the most technical team (and the best one) in all of venture capital.
• We’ve assembled a powerful Build Team of former leaders in sales, marketing, and recruiting at technical companies. They run a unique, hands-on engagement model that helps technical founders tackle new problems.
• Our community of 150+ technical founders connects on everything from recruiting engineers to what tool to use for usage-based billing.

13 years is also a long time to be investing in AI. It might be all the rage now, but it wasn’t back then. Amplify was the first investor for foundational data tools like dbt, Dagster, Hightouch, and Hex. The same is true for leading applied AI tools like Runway and Luma, plus Modal, the best way to serve AI models at scale. We’ve helped dozens of AI researchers commercialize their work, from Datology to OctoML, Covariant, and CedarDB (among others). Not to mention that Sarah’s Projects to Know newsletter has been aggregating and breaking down interesting open source projects and papers in AI since 2019. 

An important thing about Amplify is that we do it early. Our fastest growing companies today, like dbt, Chainguard, Temporal, Hightouch, and Runway, all have one thing in common: we were the first check. Actually, first check is a bit of a misnomer. Amplify was part of their lives before they started their companies. We meet engineers and researchers well before they start their companies, and often before they even know they want to start a company. One thing you’ll never hear from us: “it’s just too early.”

Over the past few funds, we’ve backed incredibly promising technical founders who started companies like Hex, Modal, TigerBeetle, WarpStream, Datology, Eppo, and SiMa. Our new funds – structured and sized identically to our previous set, plus our new bio fund – will help us continue to find, back, and support technical founders at the earliest stages. 

You might have also noticed that we've got a new look. Our new brand (courtesy of Fuzzco) reflects the technical founders we’re purpose-built for: focused, understated, and with a little bit more function than form sometimes. But don’t worry, the Amplify orange isn’t going anywhere.

Calling all technical founders

Surprise – the world is changing again. AI is coming for every piece of software and technology that we take for granted. There are twice as many software engineers graduating every year as there were a decade ago, and they’re spreading throughout the world in places previously untouched by these kinds of technical minds. Even the human genome is being digitized, as biology slowly starts to contend with software and AI. Everywhere, engineers, scientists, and researchers are running up against a new class of problems…and we’re here to be their first investors.