Amplitude at Piper Sandler Conference: AI and Enterprise Focus

On Thursday, 11 September 2025, Amplitude Inc. (NASDAQ:AMPL) presented its growth strategy at the Piper Sandler 4th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference. The company highlighted its transition towards enterprise clients, its multi-product platform evolution, and the integration of AI as a growth accelerator. While the outlook remains optimistic, challenges persist in competing with established players like Adobe and Google.

Key Takeaways

• Amplitude is focusing on enterprise customers, including traditional businesses like Ford and Chick-fil-A.
• AI integration is seen as a major growth driver, enhancing app development and user behavior understanding.
• The company aims to double ARR growth by acquiring new enterprise clients and expanding platform adoption.

Financial Performance

• Data ingestion is growing at a rate of 20% year-over-year.
• Dollar-based net retention improved from 96% in Q2 last year to 104% in the most recent quarter.
• The focus is on cross-selling the platform to drive further growth.

Operational Updates

• Amplitude is evolving into a multi-product platform with capabilities such as experimentation, guidance, surveys, and session replay.
• The company is expanding its offerings into the marketing space to connect the entire user journey from marketing efforts to in-product behavior.
• Strategic acquisitions, including Command AI, Craftful, Anari, and June, are enhancing platform capabilities.

Future Outlook

• Amplitude aims to double ARR growth by acquiring new enterprise logos and expanding platform adoption.
• There is an emphasis on continuous product innovation and delivering customer value.
• The company is positioned as a leader in the digital analytics space, offering a cohesive platform for both product and marketing teams.

Q&A Highlights

• Amplitude sees strong adoption from AI-native companies, with growth supported by enterprise and platform expansion.
• The monetization model based on events ingested provides insulation from AI monetization challenges.
• The natural language interface usage for Amplitude has increased 500 times in the past year.

For more details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Piper Sandler 4th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference:

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us here this afternoon. My name is Brett Bracey and I’m Co-Head of Tech Research here at Piper Sandler. Next fireside discussion here is going to be with Amplitude. We have the Chief Product Officer, Francois Ajenstat, and Head of Investor Relations, John Streppa. Thank you. Welcome to Nashville.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Thank you for having us.

John Streppa, Head of Investor Relations, Amplitude: Thanks for having us.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Thank you for that panel as well. Very lively discussion around AI next. Some interesting things that came out. Let’s start this discussion with something that’s a little bit unique about Amplitude, and that’s one of the few software companies I have in my whole coverage list that actually has accelerating growth. Let’s start there. Somewhat of an anomaly in software company, accelerating growth. Walk me through what are the one or two key drivers you think that have contributed to an improving growth story in the last year?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Maybe I’ll just start by describing Amplitude and why it’s relevant in this market. John could talk about the drivers. Amplitude’s mission is pretty straightforward. We help companies build better products and experiences. As every company becomes a digital company, understanding their customers, what drives acquisition of users, retention, monetization, engagement becomes even more important because the more you can delight your customers, that’s how you win and differentiate. Amplitude has built a behavioral database that brings together all the data about how users interact with our customers’ digital estate, their campaigns, their clicks, all of their activities. We create a graph and allow any customer to see retention, funnels, and all of that engagement. That becomes really, really key because we hold proprietary, unique data in this world that helps our customers get this unfair advantage of building better products. More people are building more websites. That’s a product.

They’re building e-commerce sites. They’re building mobile apps. They’re building desktop apps. Now, increasingly, it’s more AI apps. We have evolved from being a single product company to a multi-product platform. We’ve added many, many new capabilities in the past two years, including experimentation, guidance, surveys, voice of the customer, session replay capabilities. I bring all of that because part of the growth story of Amplitude has been that transformation to really becoming a platform and seeing more and more customers adopting this entire platform. We serve thousands of customers from the largest companies in the world to some of the smallest. However, a big focus for us has been around the enterprise and really moving more up-market, broadening the customers that we serve by really becoming their system of insight for all behavioral data.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Yeah, and I would just echo the transformation on the enterprise go-to-market front. Really, over the last two to three years, really transforming our entire sales engine from kind of the more transactional sellers to being more enterprise-focused sellers, focusing them up-market and diversifying our customer base. Whereas digital natives in the 2020-2021 cohort now are serving customers like Ford or Chick-fil-A, more traditional enterprises that are engaging with their customers in a more digital way. We’re helping instrument how they’re doing that and understanding their customer journeys. Got it. A bit of a change in go-to-market, focus on enterprise, going from single product to multi-product. What changes, though, in that equation as we think about AI? AI could change user interfaces. On one hand, you could have AI drive a huge explosion in the number of websites and products that people create.

On the other hand, it could shrink how many users consume products and devices. Walk me through how AI is kind of reshaping your opportunity and both a threat standpoint and an opportunity standpoint.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: I see AI as a massive accelerant for the Amplitude business because as customers use more AI to build apps faster, to build websites faster, the pace of innovation continues to accelerate. I look at every one of those apps, every website, as a socket for us to plug our light bulb into. That’s our product. We get to light up all of these things. If more and more people, and we’re democratizing application development with AI, all of these customers will need Amplitude to understand what’s going on with those apps. Because while you can build more apps faster, can you build great apps faster? We’re the difference between good and great because we help them understand where frustration exists, what matters, and where to focus. More apps, to me, creates more opportunities.

At the same time, as we build AI products and we use AI to deliver value to our customers, the complexity of our product, the ease of use dramatically, the ease of use dramatically improves. We’re lowering the bar so that we’re democratizing who’s able to use this and really transforming the value equation from building tools for humans to enabling robots to accelerate outcomes. I think that value driver, that value accelerator, drives a lot of value for our customers. Today, the other aspect is, as with AI, there’s how companies use AI, but there’s brand new AI companies that are born. Companies like Cursor, Midjourney. They realize that it’s not just about the AI, it’s about serving customers. They use Amplitude to help them build better products and differentiate in a very fast-moving, highly competitive market.

Amplitude becomes that unfair advantage that they have because they deeply understand their users and what works.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Certainly saw a wave of growth early on in the early days of the pandemic as a lot of folks went digital. How do you see that kind of early AI-native wave? Are you starting to see some good adoption of early AI-natives starting to embrace the platform as well? Yeah.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: I mean, we have some great AI-native customers that are customers of us today. At the end of the day, to Francois’s point, it’s almost just another piece of software that we are able to help instrument. The difference of Amplitude then versus now is we do have this broader base of traditional enterprise customers. As we get growth from enterprise in the platform, it’ll be buoyed by some of the growth from the AI-native companies, but it’s not going to be a dominant kind of driver overall of our business. It’s a much healthier balance of customer base today. Cursor released their tech stack and they’re using Amplitude, which was great to see. They’re trying to solve some of the traditional user interface problems that other apps are trying to solve with the way their customers are interfacing with their interface.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Sure. As I think about Amplitude as an instrumentation tool, one of the debates and conversations we’ve had over the last two days is around a lot of product-led growth companies being impacted by a shift. We had search engine optimization tools that helped you optimize for Google Search. We now have AI Search and AEO changing that opportunity. Two-part question. One, how many people are using Amplitude today for instrumentation? Is there a greater need? That’s been the big talk, how do I drive higher conversion if my traffic’s down? Is there a greater need to implement instrumentation to drive those conversion rates higher if the traffic’s going down?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: It’s actually a really interesting question and actually one where I get really excited about the potential and the opportunity. Historically, Amplitude has focused on the product persona, really helping the builders build better by understanding those users. Over the last few years, we’ve been expanding to the marketing persona, that persona that’s been best served by Adobe or Google over the years, but that is previous gen technology. We’re showing up with a broader, modern self-service tool and helping our customers see the full funnel from top of the funnel, from marketing all the way down to how that impacts the user behavior. I say all of that because these teams are coming together. All the SEO tools are old generation. Now every marketing department is being disrupted by AI. They need new tools. It’s moving fast, so they need speed. Those are the advantages of Amplitude.

In fact, in the last earnings call, we previewed some of our GenAI optimization tools where any brand can look at how they’re performing across the different LLMs, how they’re performing compared to their competitors, which prompts they are favored in versus which ones they have room for opportunity. Our unique differentiator is that we can then connect that to the actions they do in the product. The fact that you get ChatGPT to bring people to your website is good, but how do those users behave? Are they higher likelihood to convert than the Gemini users? What could you do to experiment and learn and improve? Connecting that journey is not a solution that the old tools can do. Amplitude is connecting the dots for them.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: It’s a little unique in that end-to-end visibility. What’s been the response? I mean, it’s early, but what’s been the response from some of these marketing personas?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Incredible. It’s opening. Obviously, it’s the big topic that everybody has, right? It’s opening up new doors to bring Amplitude in. That’s fantastic. We’re able to have that conversation. It’s also bringing the teams inside of organizations together.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Marketing and product.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Marketing and product, that unlocks the discussion about our entire platform.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: My light bulb’s going off here. I might put my finance cap on. Let’s talk about the monetization opportunity around that, right? As you go from product to marketing, what’s the scope of that spend look like? If you have $100 in product marketing, you expand into kind of some of these areas, what is that? Is it an extra $10? Is it an extra $20? Walk me through what the opportunity could look like.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: From the marketing budget standpoint, marketing, no offense, Francois, but marketing’s usually had a much bigger budget than product has, right? I think it does open us up to bigger budgets. It’s different ways of measuring ROI for them as well. Like how do we drive conversion for them? How do we optimize their ad spend dollars? How do we ultimately connect them to the product teams and kind of cross that chasm? I think there’s definitely a large opportunity as we get into that marketing spend budget. They’re starting to try to answer the same questions that the product managers have answered traditionally. We are perfectly fit for kind of how that transition is taking place.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Where are we at in the journey? Is this top of the first inning? Is this bottom of the first inning? Are you shipping product? Are you just talking to customers about what’s possible?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: I think we’re still in the early innings. I mean, it’s only been two years-ish since the ChatGPT unveil and models are evolving extremely fast. Where a lot of companies have been in an experimentation phase for the last two years trying to figure out how to make this new technology work, we’re now at a point where we’re starting to see some of those capabilities go out to market. As an example, we introduced a natural language interface for Amplitude called Ask Amplitude, and usage for that has grown 500x in the past year. You’re seeing that potential coming up. We launched our Amplitude AI agents back in June. It is agents that automate the tasks of product managers and become the thinking partner for a lot of these folks. The interest from our client base has gone through the roof.

They’re starting to use it and seeing value from that. It’s still early. There’s still a lot to learn, but the pace is accelerating and the interest for change and for customers to change is really happening right now.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Is there a halo effect as you think about adding new personas onto the backend data architecture? You’re collecting 17 trillion signals today. I know we’ve gone through two or three years of maybe folks buying, overbuying capacity. There’s a consumption part of the business here. If you start to land these new marketing analytics personas, it’s a much bigger market. Is there a halo effect where maybe that drives a re-acceleration in the consumption on the data consumption backend as well? Do you think of it more as new seat expansion opportunities?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: First off, I think it’s important to note that the way Amplitude monetizes is not seat-based. We monetize based on the amount of events ingested. All of the shifts that are happening in monetization of AI were insulated by that because we are really focused on the data side of things and unlocking that data for the users. What we’re seeing is that as more use cases attach to Amplitude, customers want to bring more data. They want to have a broader view of their users. The halo effect becomes, how do I bring in advertising data, marketing data, data warehouse data, instrumentation, all these things that wrap around that user and then solve more use cases? They’re adding value above experimentation, guides, surveys, voice of the customer, session replay that we then use that same data to unlock new use cases.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: I would consider you best-in-class product analytics company entering this new marketing analytics space, two 800-pound gorillas there, Google and Adobe. How do you compete? How do you win? I get the connected journey. I get there’s some capabilities you have that they don’t have. Walk me through maybe a real-world example of someone that said, Google didn’t work. Adobe didn’t work. We’re going to Amplitude.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: First thing you said, we’re the leader or a leader. Forrester just published their first ever Digital Analytics Wave that looks at this entire market. Amplitude was in the leaders quadrant, a part of that wave. The only other leader was Adobe. Amplitude was ranked the customer favorite based on the customer survey. Something we’re very proud of that we can compete with the 800-pound gorillas. As we look at those different competitors or entrants, they’re really first gen versus next gen. I have that experience from Tableau where first gen in my Tableau days were BusinessObjects, Cognos, MicroStrategy, Hyperion. That was multi-billion dollar businesses that got appended by an upstart called Tableau. We’re doing the exact same playbook with Amplitude. Now the competitors are Adobe and Google. The way we do that is self-service by being open and flexible and by delivering speed and innovation.

They’re really the old generation. I mean, Adobe is the old Omniture, which is more than a decade old. This is the new architecture, the new way. As companies realize that in order to win, they need speed, Amplitude is that unfair advantage for them.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Very large market. Tableau wasn’t the only one to try to go replace those competitors. You’re now seeing a little bit of validation. Datadog buying kind of Apple in this space for $220 million. You saw OpenAI make a billion-dollar acquisition with Stratsig. As you think about why will Amplitude win, walk me through some of the newer entrants and why you think you win.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: I would start with the OpenAI and Datadog acquisitions. I think they’re a validation of the problem that we’re going to solve. Like it was not a solution that you could buy and code your way into. You actually had to go out and buy the toolset to be able to run experimentation. It’s a validation of the tough challenges that we’re solving for our customers. From the smaller entrants, I think for each vertical that we play in, like experimentation or session replay, there are smaller point solutions out there that we are taking share from and that we are consolidating. I think what it’s coming down to is as our customers are looking at consolidating their spend into a single platform, we are the platform of choice in that next-gen player that can bring in all the toolsets.

Experimentation works better when you have analytics tied to it and you start with your analytics vendor. Session replay works better when you can run experiments and judge those. Being a platform, and it’s not just a collection of products, but one that’s truly a platform that works better together, is how we are winning and taking share from those point solutions.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: That’s why we talked about DepoSaaS in the panel. We talked about our view, this race to relevancy and the need to essentially move faster. AI is just software. SaaS is just software. The pace of AI is moving very quickly. You guys have made some really smart, really aggressive, small technology tuck-ins. Walk me through what those provided and how is that helping you race to this more relevancy in this AI era?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Yeah, over the past year, we’ve acquired four companies. We acquired Command AI for guidance surveys, a company called Craftful for voice of the customer, Anari to bolster our AI, and then June to focus on our core capabilities. In every case, we’re looking for two primary things. One, exceptional talent. That is key. We want incredible talent, and then we want incredible tech. We want that tech to get integrated as quickly as possible into our core platform. As we’ve acquired these companies, we’ve really focused on getting them into our code base, rewriting them so it becomes native. We don’t want to build a Frankenstein of products. We want to build a cohesive platform.

Part of the thing we were trying to do is really complete and provide that complete platform for our customers where qualitative and quantitative can come together, where we have the ability to not just have insights, but also take action. We wanted to do that in a way that was seamless. Bringing these capabilities in with the talent, with the tech, it also provides an opportunity in the market to accelerate the consolidation and see our customers not just as an analytics vendor, but really as a complete digital analytics solution for them.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Now we’ll get to the fun part looking forward. Do Harbor slides apply here?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Yep. Safe Harbor.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Safe Harbor. Your ARR growth has doubled from last year. I think Andrew is here. Congrats on doubling your ARR. Are the possible what would have to go right for ARR to double again?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: I’ll start and then you can jump in. I think the acceleration of the ARR growth that we’ve seen over the last year has been, you know, one, you kind of alluded to it a little bit. We had some rightsizing of our contracts that had more headwind than a tailwind for us. We’re starting to lap that. What that’s allowed us to do, our data ingestion, how we monetize, to Francois’s point, has been growing 20% year over year. That has been kind of covered up by the rightsizing of the contracts, matching the data actually being ingested that they’re contracted to. We haven’t been able to monetize on that front. What we’ve done a great job in is cross-selling the platform, and that’s helped drive our dollar-based net retention from 96 in Q2 of last year to 104 this quarter, or this most recent quarter.

Continuing to drive that cross-sell opportunity and being able to monetize on some of that growth in the data ingestion piece should help to continue to accelerate. At our investor day back in March, we laid out a plan on how we’re going to continue to drive growth of new enterprise logos. Those enterprise logos typically land much larger than our SMB mid-market. That’s where our go-to-market funds are going to, and driving that expansion to have them adopt a full platform play. That’s how we can accelerate from 16% today to farther in the future.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: It starts with an incredible product.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: It’s always the product. We have to keep executing really well on product. I think the important thing for product, just to add that in, is obviously we have to keep executing. We have to keep listening to our customers. We have to keep focusing on customer value. The more we can focus on accelerating value, accelerating outcomes, the more our customers will be delighted. They will expand. They will retain. That’s the most important thing that we have to go do and execute extremely well. I think as we have expanded our platform and are delivering more, it’s unlocking new opportunities.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: One last question as we kind of run out of time here. Francois, you joined Tableau less than $40 million business years.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: When I joined Tableau in 2010, it was $13 million.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: $13 million. You took it to a billion. As you think about scaling a small company into a much, much bigger company, what are you most excited about at Amplitude in the coming year that investors should pay attention to?

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: I’m excited about the willingness to change, learn, and focus on customers. Now we’re going into this AI world. There are different paths that companies can take. Put your head in the sand or lean in and lean into the opportunity. I’m excited about all this learning and this opportunity to change with where the market’s going. Change our go-to-market to enterprise, which we had to do at Tableau as well. When you did that, it was a massive accelerant and unlock. Now we’re changing with AI, where in the Tableau days, they were slow to move to the cloud. This is a next transformation. Amplitude, what I’m seeing is this willingness to lean in and push and move fast, where speed is the moat in this world. This is a company that moves fast, listens to customers, and innovates.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Very cool. Can’t wait to have you back here next year to see how fast you’ve moved.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Can’t wait either.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Take care. Thank you.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude: Appreciate it.

Brett Bracey, Co-Head of Tech Research, Piper Sandler: Thank you.

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