AvePoint Conference: AI Governance Push Fuels AgentPulse Pipeline

Key Points

• AI governance is becoming a major growth driver for AvePoint, with the company saying concerns about AI security, shadow AI, and agent oversight are boosting demand for its control suite. AgentPulse is already in more than half of the control-suite pipeline and could become a standalone product later.
• AvePoint is broadening beyond Microsoft into a multi-cloud data management and AI security platform, with customer conversations now spanning Google, Salesforce, AWS, Azure and other environments. Executives said the company’s value is strongest in mixed-license, multi-platform deployments where AI risk and exposure are top concerns.
• The company expects a second-half recovery in public sector demand, especially in U.S. federal, which was a headwind last year. Management also said future investment will focus mainly on sales, marketing and brand awareness as AvePoint works toward $1 billion in ARR.

AvePoint NASDAQ: AVPT executives said the company is broadening its position from its Microsoft roots into a wider data management, governance and AI security platform, with artificial intelligence driving new customer conversations and pipeline growth.

Speaking at a Jefferies event hosted by analyst Joe Gallo, AvePoint CEO Tianyi Jiang described the company’s evolution from serving on-premises Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint environments to supporting cloud-based Office workloads and, increasingly, multi-cloud deployments across Google, Salesforce, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.

Jiang said AvePoint’s historical focus on data management, curation and governance is becoming more relevant as enterprises deploy AI. He said customers and partners now view AvePoint as part of the AI infrastructure stack for “AI trust, AI governance, AI security.”

AI Governance Drives Control Suite Demand

Jiang said the push to deploy AI has made data quality, classification, access controls and security more important for customers. He said AvePoint is seeing concern around “shadow AI,” as enterprises seek visibility into which agents are being created, what data they access and how they interact with other agents.

The company’s control suite currently contributes about 26% of annual recurring revenue, but Jiang said it represents about 40% of the company’s total pipeline. He added that more than 50% of the control pipeline now includes AgentPulse, AvePoint’s recently introduced product for managing AI agents.

“This is now top of mind for every C-level around AI security and AI risk,” Jiang said.

CFO Jim Caci said AgentPulse was introduced midway through the first quarter and is currently being sold in bundles with other control suite products. He said the product has helped increase uptake of those upper-level bundles in the pipeline. Based on normal deal cycles, Caci said the impact is more likely to show up in the third and fourth quarters than in the second quarter. He also said AvePoint may eventually introduce a standalone AgentPulse SKU.

Executives Say AI Is Broadening Conversations Beyond Microsoft

Jiang said AI is also changing how customers evaluate infrastructure. While AvePoint remains heavily connected to Microsoft, he said many enterprise conversations now focus less on Microsoft Copilot specifically and more on agentic deployments across multiple platforms.

He said AvePoint is agnostic about whether customers create agents through Microsoft, Claude, Gemini, Salesforce or other systems, and that customers increasingly frame the issue as “AI exposure” and “AI risk,” rather than only a Microsoft estate problem.

Jiang also addressed Microsoft Purview, describing Microsoft and Google as “market makers” and saying AvePoint has long operated alongside large platform providers. He said AvePoint can use Purview tags and classifications when customers have them, or apply machine learning-based tagging when they do not. He said AvePoint’s value is strongest in mixed-license and multi-cloud environments, where customers want to maximize returns across technology stacks.

Resiliency Remains Part of Broader Data Management

On AvePoint’s resiliency suite, Jiang said the company increasingly views resiliency as part of broader data management and data security rather than a standalone category. He said demand rose after an Amazon regional data center disruption in the Middle East, which prompted some customers to reassess reliance on hyperscalers for disaster recovery and redundancy.

Jiang said AvePoint touches about 1,000 petabytes of data each day through snapshots, creating a data store that can support governance, taxonomy management and analysis of unstructured data. He said customers are asking for ways to gain intelligence from data without affecting production environment performance.

Public Sector Expected to Recover

Caci said AvePoint’s public sector practice is global, with activity in Japan, Singapore and Europe as well as the United States. However, he said the U.S. federal business was a headwind last year and “didn’t really see any growth.”

This year, Caci said AvePoint is seeing “nice pipeline growth” and first-quarter performance in line with expectations. He said the federal business is typically stronger in the third and fourth quarters and that the company expects a recovery in public sector demand, particularly in U.S. federal, during those periods.

Caci said that recovery is one factor supporting AvePoint’s forecast for growth acceleration in the second half of the year.

Investment Focused on Sales, Marketing and Brand Awareness

Asked about guidance, including 26% constant-currency ARR growth, Caci said AvePoint’s visibility has improved through forecasting discipline, CRM systems and pipeline management. He said the company has spent years improving its methodology for reviewing opportunities, quota capacity and product needs.

Caci also discussed AvePoint’s plan to invest in 2026, saying the company has already built infrastructure that can support a much larger business. He said the company is approaching $450 million in ARR and has a global structure more typical of a company with $1 billion or more in revenue scale.

As a result, he said incremental investment will be concentrated in sales and marketing, including brand awareness and channel strategy, rather than large increases in overhead. He said AvePoint previously spent about 44% to 45% of revenue on sales and marketing when it went public, compared with about 31% in the latest quarter, with a long-term target of 30%. He said general and administrative expenses are targeted to decline toward 10% of revenue, while research and development is expected to remain around 12%.

Caci said those 2026 investments are not needed to hit the company’s ARR forecast for that year and are more likely to contribute in late 2026, 2027 and beyond.

Jiang said AvePoint is also using AI internally, including GitHub Copilot in development, content support in marketing, contract management in legal and finance applications. He said the goal is to grow toward $1 billion in ARR while maintaining profitability and improving efficiency, rather than adding costs proportionally with revenue growth.

About AvePoint NASDAQ: AVPT

AvePoint, Inc NASDAQ: AVPT is a leading software provider specializing in data management, governance, and compliance solutions for Microsoft 365 and related cloud platforms. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, the company offers a comprehensive suite of cloud-based and on-premises tools designed to help organizations migrate, manage, and protect their collaboration data. AvePoint's flagship Cloud Platform delivers backup, governance, reporting, and migration services for SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, and Salesforce environments.

With a customer base spanning thousands of organizations across more than 100 countries, AvePoint serves enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions seeking to ensure data security, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience.

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