Why AMPLYFI Selected AWS as a Strategic Partner

The success of an emerging technology giant is grounded in its people, its products, its attitude, and the quality of its infrastructure underpinnings. The earlier in its evolution that a company gets these ingredients in place, the quicker it scales and establishes itself as a market leader. Some of these ingredients are in its DNA, others depend on selecting the right strategic partners at the right time.

For U.K. startup AMPLYFI, the team took a very methodical approach to ensuring it had the right people, products and attitude, an approach it repeated when deciding which strategic infrastructure provider to form a long-term partnership with.

This requirement came to a head in early 2020, when AMPLYFI purchased U.S.-based Deep Web Technologies (DWT), a leader in federated search and data connectors. While DWT utilized DigitalOcean, AMPLYFI saw an opportunity to streamline operations and scale activities by migrating all its services to a single provider.

As a company that offers globally deployed SaaS products, AMPLYFI understood at a technical level the imperative of working with the best of the major cloud service providers. However, the team also appreciated the need to identify a partner with shared ambitions and values; one that was both mindful of where the company was in its journey and willing to proactively collaborate for long-term, mutual success. While AMPLYFI’s technical requirements were high, ranging from training cutting edge AI models, to building APIs and full-stack monitoring, for example, its demands for performance, professionalism, and ambition in a strategic partner were even higher, says Chris Ganje, Co-founder and CEO.

Chris Ganje, Co-founder and CEO

“We’re building world-leading business intelligence products, so the bar for any company to partner with us in any capacity has to be high – really high. To support AMPLYFI’s ambition and complex technical requirements, we needed to identify which cloud provider would be the best fit by comprehensively testing AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean.”

Founded in 2015, AMPLYFI specialises in developing AI-based platforms that unlock and analyse the vast amount of relevant data on the internet, internal company databases, and industry databases, to generate key decision-driving insights. Its products are used by some of the world’s largest organizations to enhance their existing business intelligence and market research capabilities by spotting early warning signals to future disruption, improving portfolio risk management, and deepening customer relationships.

AMPLYFI deploys a range of AI techniques, from machine learning, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and unsupervised learning, to locate and interpret unstructured content held across the internet and within internal databases. AMPLYFI then transforms it into machine-curated structured datasets that are used to augment customers’ existing traditional datasets by automatically correcting, expanding, refreshing, and generating new insights.

When it came to evaluating AMPLYFI’s infrastructure requirements, Ganje says his team sought to grade each potential partner not just on the quality of services and costs, but also on their eagerness to collaborate on co-development and co-sell opportunities. They even used their own products to generate machine-driven intelligence on each provider’s global sphere of influence, sentiment, and sustainability credentials. “AWS was the clear winner on every metric,” says Ganje.

“AWS has helped us massively on that front, offering services like Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, and Step Functions. It has been critical to developing and expanding our multifaceted data processing pipelines at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional infrastructure. As for storage and integrity, fully managed services such as  Amazon DynamoDB, and Elasticsearch have allowed us to store and readily utilize vast amounts of data with ease. This frees up our resources to enable us to concentrate on our core areas of expertise and adding value for our customers.” says Ganje.

He also acknowledges the support and value that AMPLYFI has received from the AWS Startups team, especially with the migration of DWT post acquisition. Founders of startups are time and resource constrained, so having the support of a dedicated team, many of which are ex-founders themselves and understand their pain points, is critical.

The AWS Startup Team has since worked hand-in-glove with AMPLYFI to support the successful migration and integration of its tech into a common framework. This experience will be featured in an upcoming series of webinars starting on July 28th in which AWS Startup community members describe their journeys (https://go.aws/2YMRtEW).

“What impressed us most about AWS was the love and passion they demonstrated for AMPLYFI and its understanding of our continuously evolving needs. While other providers showed an eagerness to partner with AMPLYFI and offer short term benefits, AWS stood out as THE entity to provide us with the essential long-term infrastructure continuity and stability we need. When we layered on our own independent assessment, it became one of the easier decisions we have ever had to make.”

AMPLYFI has already raised over $10 million in funding and, with no shortage of ambition, it knows that by locking-in this key strategic relationship early, it can focus on forging ahead with bringing new innovations to market and disrupting the business intelligence space. “From the services offered to assistance with migrating, doing this in partnership with AWS has been world-class,” says Ganje.