Amplitude: The Product Behind Product-First Companies

By Somesh Dash, Tom Loverro and Armaan Ali

Today, IVP is proud to announce its investment in Amplitude, a next-generation web and mobile analytics platform that helps companies build better products. IVP is the lead investor in a $30M Series C financing.

IVP is a leading later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA, and has been fortunate enough to partner with talented entrepreneurs to help build disruptive Enterprise companies such as AppDynamics (CSCO), Dropbox, GitHub, MuleSoft (MULE), Pure Storage (PSTG), Slack, and Tanium, among many others.

Here’s why we at IVP are excited to add Amplitude to that list:

Empowering CPOs

In the old world, websites and web applications were essentially marketing tools — glorified digital brochures. Product and Engineering teams were responsible for pushing new releases out the door, but it was Marketing’s job to drive growth and engagement. Product and Engineering may have created the websites of the 1990s and 2000s, but Marketing owned them. By virtue of taking ownership for most company’s websites, Marketing departments grew and grew. Soon every company had a CMO. With the tailwind of the web at their back, Marketing budgets quickly ballooned as did the ecosystems of software tools catering to their needs.

Today, however, websites and apps often are the product. Modern Product teams are increasingly recognized as critical drivers of revenue, not just Marketing. Thus, Product teams are gaining influence and CPO, Chief Product Officer, is the newest C-level executive in the C-Suite. While the role and prominence of Product teams has continued to evolve, the same can’t be said for their toolsets. Product organizations are often forced to buy archaic solutions meant for Marketing or build out unwieldy and invariably out-of-touch internal tools to fit their specific needs.

That’s where Amplitude comes in. Amplitude is built explicitly for the Product team and CPO, focusing directly on user behavior: what motivates people to use your product, pay for it, and keep coming back? What user actions correlate best with high-value customers? What decisions can your product organization make to actually drive retention, engagement, and revenue? Amplitude’s solution is architected from the ground up to help Product teams find the answers to these complicated questions. Using NOVA, its proprietary engine optimized to answer complex queries over aggregated sets of users, Amplitude is able to handle data far more effectively than existing alternatives, allowing Product teams to efficiently analyze the information most relevant to their businesses. Moreover, Amplitude’s simple and seamless interface democratizes this data so that everyone in the organization can have a deep understanding of user behavior.

Customer Delight

Amplitude is serving Product teams with what they want and need — a Product-native solution for Product Analytics. The benefits of this approach are evident in Amplitude’s customer satisfaction. Rarely have we witnessed a more evangelical and enthusiastic customer base than Amplitude’s. It quickly became clear to us that Amplitude is the market leader and market-defining company in the emerging category of Product Analytics.

Amplitude now serves over 5,000 companies, ranging from cutting edge startups to the Fortune 500. Adidas, HubSpot, Intuit, Microsoft, MindBody, Venmo and Western Union all use Amplitude as their Product Analytics solution of choice, and more companies are joining their ranks every day.

Visionary Co-Founders with World-Class Investors & Advisors

Amplitude is led by its exceptional Co-Founders, Spenser Skates (CEO) and Curtis Liu (CTO), who have been working together since their freshman year at MIT. In the five years since launching Amplitude, Spenser and Curtis have managed to recruit an incredible group of proven technologists, executives, investors, and advisors to join their mission. Amplitude has the potential to do for Product what Adobe has done for Marketing and Salesforce has done for Sales. We are thrilled to be part of the team.

Somesh Dash is a General Partner at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. Tom Loverro is a Principal and Armaan Ali is an Associate at IVP.