Sunil Dhaliwal

Background

Sunil Dhaliwal is the Founder and General Partner of Amplify Partners, a venture firm he founded in 2012 with an initial $40 million fund focused exclusively on enterprise and infrastructure startups ¹². His father was an electrical engineer who immigrated from India and founded his own company, an experience that shaped Dhaliwal’s orientation toward technical founders ³.

Dhaliwal graduated from Georgetown University with a B.S. in Finance and International Business ³⁴. He began his career as an analyst at Alex. Brown & Sons (1996-1998), and also spent two summers as an inside sales representative for a software company, an experience he has described as formative ³⁴. He joined Battery Ventures in 1998, just two years out of college, and spent 14 years there as a General Partner investing in IT infrastructure companies including Chef, Netezza (acquired by IBM), Splunk (IPO on NASDAQ), CipherTrust (acquired by Secure Computing), and @stake (acquired by Symantec) ²³⁵.

Dhaliwal has been named to the Forbes Midas List, which ranks the top 100 venture capitalists globally, and to the AlwaysOn Top 100 list of VCs ³⁶. Amplify Partners has grown from its initial $40M fund to managing over $2.4 billion in assets across multiple funds. In June 2025, the firm closed three new funds totaling $900 million: Fund VI ($400M for first-check investments in technical founders), Fund VI Select ($300M for existing portfolio companies scaling up), and Amplify Bio I ($200M for digital biology) ⁷⁸.

Stated Thesis

Dhaliwal publicly describes his investment focus as backing “founders with unique insights into distributed systems, data infrastructure, or information security” ³. He has said that Amplify was designed “purpose-built for the new generation of technical company-builders: the engineers, the researchers, the creatives tackling foundational challenges in distributed computing, developer tooling, data, machine learning, and cybersecurity” ⁹.

Dhaliwal emphasizes founder-market fit and deep domain expertise. He has stated: “You have to understand this problem, you have to appreciate it, have lived it, worked around it for a number of years, and by being close to problems, you’re probably best positioned to deliver solutions” ¹⁰. On the primacy of technical founders, he has said: “If you gave me the choice between someone who really deeply understood technology and not as a founder, I’m going to take the one who does” ¹⁰.

He has described Amplify’s founding premise as filling a gap in the VC market: a firm that deeply understood IT infrastructure while maintaining the fund size and incentive structure suited for early-stage investing ⁶. Roughly 80 percent of the teams Amplify backs are led by first-time founders, and 90 percent of these are described as “hyper-technical domain experts” ¹¹.

With the 2025 launch of Amplify Bio I, the firm expanded its stated thesis to include digital biology, targeting technical founders “blending biology and AI expertise to solve problems at the intersection of code and lab work” ⁷.

Inferred Thesis

Based on 55 verified investments from the Amplify Partners portfolio page where partnership dates are available, the following patterns emerge. This sample represents a subset of the firm’s reported 162 total investments, and reflects Amplify as a whole rather than Dhaliwal’s personal deal attribution alone, though as founder and GP he has been involved in the majority of investments.

Sector breakdown (55 verified investments): - Developer tools and computing infrastructure: 20 of 55 (36%) — Gremlin, Mabl, Foxglove, Authzed, Diagrid, bitdrift, Effectful, Anyscale, Archera, Cubist, Goldsky, Gallop, Anchorage, Fermyon, Buddybuild, CMD, Command E, Manifold, Conjur, Backtrace - Machine learning and AI: 13 of 55 (24%) — Covariant, DatologyAI, Diffbot, Dyndrite, Gorgias, Gradium, LangChain, Luma AI, Magic, Emancro, Inevitable, Einblick, Determined AI - Data and analytics: 8 of 55 (15%) — dbt Labs, Hex, Hightouch, Dagster, Datafold, Allium, Continual, Cask Data - Digital biology and healthcare: 8 of 55 (15%) — Enlitic, InterVenn, Chai Discovery, Axiom Bio, Centivax, Boltz, Infinitopes, Cambridge Cancer Genomics - Cybersecurity: 4 of 55 (7%) — Chainguard, Material Security, LightCyber, Integris Software - Enterprise / other: 2 of 55 (4%) — ActionIQ, Intellimize

Stage distribution: Amplify predominantly invests at seed and Series A. Partnership dates on the firm’s portfolio page frequently coincide with company founding years, indicating the firm often makes first-check investments at formation or pre-seed. This is consistent with Dhaliwal’s stated goal of backing founders “before they even know they want to start a company” ⁷.

Geographic concentration: Portfolio companies are heavily concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, consistent with the firm’s Menlo Park and San Francisco offices. Secondary concentrations appear in New York, Boston, and Seattle, with a smaller number in Israel and London ⁴.

Check size: The firm targets approximately $2.75 million for seed investments, with a range of $500K to $5 million at initial check ⁴¹². The $300M Select fund allows follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies at later stages.

Founder profile patterns: Dhaliwal has a strong preference for deeply technical founders — engineers, researchers, and domain experts rather than business-oriented founders. The portfolio is dominated by companies founded by engineers with infrastructure or systems backgrounds. Multiple portfolio companies were founded by former employees of major tech infrastructure companies (Datadog, Google, Cloudflare, etc.).

Co-investor patterns: Based on portfolio company funding data, frequent co-investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, GV (Google Ventures), Norwest Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital. The firm’s bio fund investments include co-investments with Future Ventures, a16z Bio, and Zetta Ventures.

Exit patterns: Two IPOs — Datadog (2019, NASDAQ) and Fastly (2019, NYSE) — represent flagship outcomes ³⁹. A significant number of portfolio companies have been acquired by major tech platforms: Chef by Progress Software, Cask Data by Google, BlueData by HPE, Buddybuild by Apple, CMD by Elastic, Determined AI by HPE, Fermyon by Akamai, LightCyber by Palo Alto Networks, Conjur by CyberArk, Suplari by Microsoft, Command E by Dropbox, Einblick by Databricks, Eppo by Datadog, and Intellimize by Webflow ¹³.

Notable gaps vs. stated thesis: The stated thesis emphasizes cybersecurity as a core focus area, but only 4 of 55 verified investments (7%) are primarily cybersecurity companies. The firm’s actual portfolio skews much more heavily toward developer tools and data infrastructure than the public messaging would suggest. The 2025 expansion into digital biology represents a meaningful thesis evolution not present in the firm’s first decade.

Portfolio

In Their Own Words

“If you gave me the choice between someone who really deeply understood technology and not as a founder, I’m going to take the one who does.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, Open Source Ready podcast, Heavybit ¹⁰

“We started Amplify really to do one thing which was to back technical founders and that seems like not that crazy of a statement at this point, but at the time it was a little bit unique because you tended to have people who were very strong in the business side of things and then the engineers were maybe the afterthought.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, Open Source Ready podcast, Heavybit ¹⁰

“Taste matters. Product-market fit’s a version of taste. Does it do the thing that you need? Security matters. Reliability matters… I don’t think anyone’s going to go vibe code away Cloudflare. No one’s going to vibe code away Crowdstrike. No one’s going to vibe code away Datadog.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, Open Source Ready podcast, Heavybit ¹⁰

“You have to understand this problem, you have to appreciate it, have lived it, worked around it for a number of years, and by being close to problems, you’re probably best positioned to deliver solutions.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, Open Source Ready podcast, Heavybit ¹⁰

“The code isn’t the software. That’s not the brand, that’s not the packaging, that’s not the runtime, that’s not the delivery, that’s not the support.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, on open source strategy, Open Source Ready podcast, Heavybit ¹⁰

“I don’t think models have to run behind a couple big titans or the duopoly or an oligopoly of large players. I think there are ways for meaningful open source models to actually make an impact.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, Open Source Ready podcast, Heavybit ¹⁰

“Don’t be in the business of administering IT if you are running a company. Turn on 2-factor auth for everything. It’s just good hygiene.” — Sunil Dhaliwal, YeshID blog interview ¹⁶

What Founders Say

“Sunil is an incredibly rare kind of investor. He gets behind the thesis of your business, tells you what he thinks clearly and without judgment, and gives you the room to make the best decisions you can. Most importantly, nobody is better when things get hard, and they always get hard.” — Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative (and co-founder of Chef), Amplify Partners website ³

No additional independently sourced founder testimonials found beyond the Amplify Partners website. Portfolio founder quotes from independent sources (press, social media, podcasts) were not located during research.

Connections

• Board member, Fastly (NYSE: FSLY) — served on board of directors ¹⁷
• Board member, System Initiative — alongside Adam Jacob (CEO), who previously co-founded Chef ¹⁸³
• Board member, Hex — as noted on Crunchbase ¹⁹
• Board member, Sym — as noted on Crunchbase ¹⁹
• Lead investor, YeshID — through Amplify Partners ¹⁶
• Former General Partner, Battery Ventures (1998-2012) — invested in Chef, Netezza, Splunk, CipherTrust, @stake ³⁵
• Former Analyst, Alex. Brown & Sons (1996-1998) ⁴
• Co-investor pattern: Frequent co-investors across the Amplify portfolio include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, GV, FirstMark Capital, and Future Ventures (in bio deals) ⁷¹³
• Forbes Midas List — named to the list ranking top 100 global VCs ³⁶
• Podcast appearances: SaaStr Podcast with Jason Lemkin ²⁰, Venture Unlocked podcast ⁶, Origins podcast ²¹, Open Source Ready podcast at Heavybit ¹⁰, Force Management podcast on sales leadership ²², Cooley GO quarterly VC update ²³

Sources