AvePoint Sees AI Governance Demand Surge as AgentPulse Tackles Shadow AI

Key Points

• AvePoint is positioning itself as an “AI trust layer” that helps enterprises manage AI-related risks, costs, permissions and data governance across cloud environments.
• Its AgentPulse product targets “shadow AI” by discovering and governing AI agents, with customers reportedly managing an average of 5,000 agents and some monitoring up to 100,000. Control Suite customers doubled from the first to second quarter.
• AvePoint reported its 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit net new ARR growth, with 87% of revenue recurring, and plans to expand its go-to-market efforts beyond its core Microsoft ecosystem into Google, Salesforce and Atlassian environments.

AvePoint NASDAQ: AVPT is positioning its cloud data management, governance and security platform as an “AI trust layer” for enterprises as organizations seek to control the risks, costs and data-access issues associated with artificial intelligence deployments.

Speaking at Oppenheimer’s 29th Annual Technology Conference, Chief Executive Officer Tianyi Jiang said the company’s longstanding work managing unstructured enterprise data—including emails, chats, files and contracts—has become increasingly relevant as customers deploy AI systems that rely on internal corporate information.

“The two top of mind issues we help companies, large and small address, one is AI risk and AI cost,” Jiang said. He described AvePoint as operating between AI models and enterprise data, helping customers manage access controls, data lifecycle policies, permissions, time sensitivity and cost visibility.

AgentPulse Extends Governance to AI Agents

Jiang highlighted AvePoint’s AgentPulse offering, which is designed to discover and govern AI agents operating across cloud environments. He said the company views agents similarly to employees because they can access systems, process data and make decisions, but they operate at machine speed.

According to Jiang, AvePoint’s existing delegated governance framework enables business users to provide context around what AI agents should be able to access. The platform can then track agents’ data rights, access rights, lifecycle and costs. The company currently supports services and agents associated with Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and ChatGPT, he said.

AvePoint introduced AgentPulse as part of its Control Suite in the first quarter and said the number of Control Suite customers doubled by the second quarter. In July, the company made the product available as an independent SKU, including a lighter version intended to help customers identify “shadow AI” activity within their organizations.

Jiang said customers using AgentPulse are actively managing an average of 5,000 AI agents, with the number of agents per customer doubling quarterly. He added that some customers are monitoring and managing as many as 100,000 agents. He noted that agents can include relatively lightweight workflows created through AI-assisted coding, rather than only sophisticated virtual-worker systems.

Security, Classification and Recovery Efforts

Jiang said AvePoint’s experience serving regulated industries and public-sector customers gives it an established foundation for managing AI-related security challenges. He pointed to certifications including FedRAMP in the U.S. and ISMAP in Japan, as well as the company’s work supporting government and commercial data centers.

The company recently released Kinetic Classification, which Jiang described as dynamic content reclassification based on changes in policies, roles and data. The capability is intended to update the context around data objects in real time as AI systems interact with them.

Jiang said data governance is particularly important because a growing share of unstructured data is generated by AI. Without active curation, management and retirement of that information, he said AI systems can experience “drift” and become less grounded in reliable data.

AvePoint also released what Jiang called rapid intelligence recovery, intended to prioritize assets for faster recovery when data or infrastructure is damaged or altered. He said the company has deployed ransomware detection and recovery technology to more than 20,000 customers and is applying those capabilities to AI damage detection and recovery.

AI Use Across Products and Operations

Beyond governance, Jiang said AvePoint is using AI internally in software development, quality assurance, customer support, sales support and finance. Developers use GitHub Copilot, while automated testing systems also employ AI, he said.

At the product level, Jiang cited AVA, the AvePoint Virtual Assistant, which is intended to identify customer risks and exposures and recommend platform capabilities that could help address those issues, including potential license and storage savings.

He also discussed the company’s tyGraph product, which collects metadata and signals from Microsoft Graph, including interaction patterns, sentiment, conversations, emails and file-access activity. AvePoint has added an agentic interface so business users can query that information through AI rather than the product’s conventional user interface, Jiang said.

Another product, Opus, began as a records-management offering and includes AI classification capabilities to help customers discover taxonomies, classify data and support migrations between systems. Jiang said Opus also provides storage optimization capabilities, such as identifying data that has not been accessed for extended periods and reducing unnecessary document versions and duplication.

Revenue Model and Market Opportunity

Jiang said 87% of AvePoint’s business is fully recurring, with approximately 12% to 13% tied to services. The company primarily uses employee-count, seat-based subscription pricing, though it also uses capacity- or consumption-based pricing for certain migration, backup and cloud-compute workloads.

Chief Financial Officer Jim Caci said the company focuses on delivering a return on investment to customers regardless of how software pricing evolves. Jiang added that AvePoint is maintaining its seat-based approach for many offerings because customers value predictability, particularly amid concerns about potentially volatile AI consumption costs.

The company reported its 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit net new annual recurring revenue growth in the second quarter, Jiang said, adding that it was AvePoint’s largest net new ARR quarter. He said AvePoint is expanding beyond its core Microsoft ecosystem into environments including Google, Salesforce and Atlassian.

Jiang said the company plans to increase go-to-market investment, particularly in channel development and brand awareness, as it pursues a larger addressable market. He noted that nearly 60% of revenue is generated through partners and said sales and marketing costs as a percentage of revenue have declined from 44% when AvePoint went public to 31%.

Looking ahead, Jiang said cybersecurity remains his primary concern. AI-enabled cyber threats, prompt-injection attacks and the expanding range of security surfaces require a multilayered approach involving endpoint protection, email security and employee education, he said.

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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