amplify-partners
(7)
Lenny Pruss
Lenny Pruss is a General Partner at Amplify Partners, a Menlo Park-based early-stage venture firm focused on deeply technical founders building developer tools, data infrastructure, and enterprise software. A Soviet-born refugee who grew up in Silicon Valley during the 1990s tech boom, Pruss studied EECS at UC Berkeley and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, where he co-founded Rock Venture Partners, a student-led seed fund. Before Amplify, he backed companies like Datadog at RRE Ventures and led HashiCorp's investment at Redpoint Ventures. His portfolio now spans more than a dozen infrastructure and developer-tools bets, including Cockroach Labs, dbt, Temporal, Dagster, Sourcegraph, Chainguard, and Antithesis, reflecting a conviction that the hard problems in software correctness, data movement, and security are still largely unsolved.
Mike Dauber
Mike Dauber is a General Partner at Amplify Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture firm with over $900M under management focused exclusively on deeply technical founders. A former hardware engineer turned enterprise sales executive at Altera and Xilinx, he brings rare operator credibility to early-stage investing across developer tools, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI. He backed companies including Chainguard, Temporal, and Gremlin, and earlier investments include Splunk's rise to NASDAQ. His investing philosophy centers on 'practitioner founders' - operators who have lived the problems they solve.
Natalie Vais
Natalie Vais is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where she backs early-stage founders building developer-first tools, platforms, and infrastructure. A former Oracle engineer, Google Cloud product lead, and Amplify Partners principal, she brings rare technical depth to VC - having personally shipped databases and distributed systems before writing checks. Her portfolio includes TigerBeetle, MotherDuck, Polar Signals, and ElectricSQL. While at Google, her team's carbon-monitoring satellite imagery project was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2020.
Sarah Catanzaro
Sarah Catanzaro is General Partner at Amplify Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture firm investing in technical founders building data infrastructure, machine learning tools, and enterprise software. Before venture, she mapped Somali pirate networks and built threat intelligence systems for the US Secret Service. She joined Amplify in 2017, made partner in 2020, and became General Partner in 2022. Her portfolio includes RunwayML, LangChain, Modal Labs, Hex, DatologyAI, and WarpStream. She invests pre-product, bets on problem-obsessed founders, and argues that most AI struggles trace back to bad data.
Sunil Dhaliwal
Sunil Dhaliwal is the Founder and General Partner of Amplify Partners, one of the earliest solo-GP, deeply technical, sector-focused VC firms in Silicon Valley. Since launching with a $40M fund in 2012, he has built Amplify into a $900M+ platform backing engineers, researchers, and scientists at the seed and Series A stages. His portfolio includes Datadog, Fastly, Recursion, LangChain, Luma AI, and 170+ active companies across infrastructure, developer tools, AI/ML, and digital biology. Named twice to the Forbes Midas List, Dhaliwal brings over 25 years of experience investing in category-defining technology companies.
Neiman Mathew
Neiman Mathew is a Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on early-stage founders building the next generation AI stack. He skipped college to pursue technology, spending years at Hex Labs applying AI to materials discovery and at Schmidt Futures funding ambitious AI-for-science research before joining Amplify Partners and then Greylock. Known for engaging founders before they even have a business idea, Mathew brings a rare combination of deep scientific intuition and investor pattern-recognition to the earliest and most uncertain bets in AI.
Justin Gage
Justin Gage is the founder and writer of Technically, a newsletter that makes software and AI concepts accessible to non-engineers. With 72,000+ subscribers on Substack, he built one of the most respected tech-explainer newsletters from scratch - conceived during a 7-hour Tokyo airport layover - growing it without paid ads through authentic writing and word-of-mouth. By day, he serves as VP of Developer Marketing at Amplify Partners, an early-stage VC firm focused on technical founders.