AvePoint (NASDAQ:AVPT) Chief Executive Tianyi Jiang said the company is positioning itself as a “trust layer” for enterprise artificial intelligence deployments, as customers grapple with rising AI costs, data governance needs and the spread of unauthorized or unmanaged AI agents.
Speaking during a presentation and fireside chat, Jiang said AvePoint currently has $435 million in recurring revenue and expects to exceed the half-billion-dollar mark by year-end. He said SaaS now accounts for about 80% of total revenue, with SaaS revenue growing 38%. AvePoint’s trailing 12-month total revenue is $444 million, and Jiang said the company estimates nearly $100 million in free cash flow this year on more than $520 million of revenue.
AI Adoption Creates New Governance and Cost Challenges
Jiang framed AvePoint’s opportunity around helping companies manage and secure the proprietary data used to train or inform AI systems. He said most enterprise data remains unstructured, including emails, chats and contracts, and is often spread across multiple systems.
“Enterprise data is their proprietary moat,” Jiang said, adding that companies need data consolidation, classification, tagging, access control and lifecycle management before they can generate meaningful AI output.
Jiang said the current AI adoption cycle is increasingly defined by “agentic” AI and “shadow AI,” where employees or business units create or deploy AI agents outside central IT oversight. He said the two most urgent issues he hears from CEOs are AI risk and AI cost.
According to Jiang, companies are discovering that broad AI usage can become expensive before producing clear returns. He said enterprises are moving away from simply maximizing token usage and toward efforts to identify, control and optimize AI activity.
AvePoint Highlights AgentPulse and Pipeline Momentum
Jiang said AvePoint’s platform is designed to give companies visibility into what AI agents are running in their environments, what data they can access, what systems they interact with and what costs they generate. He said that capability can help enterprises control both AI risk and AI spending.
The company’s offerings include data resiliency, such as backup, recovery, archiving and ransomware recovery; modernization, including migration and integration; and control, including governance and lifecycle management. Jiang said AvePoint operates its SaaS platform across 18 data center instances, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, U.S. government and Singapore government data centers.
Jiang specifically pointed to AvePoint AgentPulse, which he said was launched around the same time as Microsoft Agent 365. He said customers are already deploying or trialing the product, citing Temasek as one customer trialing AgentPulse.
Jiang said AvePoint has seen a shift in demand toward its governance and control products. He said control now represents 40% of the company’s pipeline, compared with 26% of the business previously tied to governance. He added that agentic governance is already 50% of AvePoint’s total control pipeline and is increasing deal sizes.
Microsoft Relationship and Multi-Cloud Expansion
Jiang addressed investor questions about AvePoint’s long-running relationship with Microsoft, saying the company is part of Microsoft’s ecosystem but does not depend on Microsoft for revenue generation.
“Microsoft doesn’t give us leads, nor resell our software,” Jiang said. He added that AvePoint helps Microsoft customers make broader use of cloud workloads, including Copilot and Purview.
While Jiang said AvePoint has historically generated about 90% of its revenue from Microsoft 365-related work, he said the company is increasingly focused on multi-cloud environments, including Google Cloud and AWS. He said many AI agents run in compute cloud environments rather than Microsoft 365, creating opportunities around data protection, resiliency and governance across Azure, Google Cloud and AWS workloads.
Jiang said Google is becoming a stronger enterprise player with Gemini and is hiring senior commercial leaders from Microsoft. He said AvePoint expects to become a more prominent partner in the Google ecosystem as customers adopt multi-cloud and multi-model AI strategies.
Competitive Positioning and Growth Priorities
Asked about competitors including Commvault and Varonis, Jiang said different vendors have strengths rooted in their original markets. He described Varonis as strong in file-share security, monitoring, governance and remediation, while Commvault is a broad backup provider. Jiang said AvePoint’s core strength is Microsoft 365, particularly for enterprises that view it as a mission-critical platform.
Jiang said AvePoint serves enterprise, mid-market and small business customers across multiple regions and industries. He noted that no single customer accounts for more than 2% of revenue. He also said the company has dedicated teams by customer segment and region, including a public sector practice based in Arlington, Virginia, in a security-cleared facility.
Jiang said AvePoint has completed six small acquisitions since going public and now has an appetite to use its balance sheet for inorganic expansion. He also cited stock repurchases, saying the company bought back $50 million of stock last year, had already repurchased $70 million as of its latest earnings update and topped up its authorization by another $150 million.
Jamie Arestia, vice president of investor relations, said the company’s consistent demand and growth are underappreciated by investors. Jiang said AvePoint has delivered 12 consecutive quarters of outperformance, but added that the company needs to gain scale more quickly.
“Size does matter,” Jiang said. “We need to gain critical size as fast as we can.”
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.
