AvePoint may be the largest company most people outside the Microsoft ecosystem have never heard of. Founded in 2001 and listed on Nasdaq since 2021, it built its business on the unglamorous work of backing up, migrating, and governing Microsoft 365 data. That foundation has become newly strategic: enterprises discovered that deploying Copilot safely requires exactly the data hygiene AvePoint has been selling for years.
Two decades in the plumbing
TJ Jiang and Kai Gong founded AvePoint in 2001 to build the tools Microsoft didn't ship. In the SharePoint years that meant backup, migration, and administration software, and the same idea of filling the gaps around Microsoft still runs through the product line today.
For most of its history the company grew on its own revenue. Outside money came later and in stages: Summit Partners in 2007, Goldman Sachs in 2014, and a $200 million round led by TPG's Sixth Street in 2020. AvePoint went public in 2021 by merging with Apex Technology Acquisition Corp., a deal that valued it at about $2 billion. Both founders stayed on, Jiang as CEO and Gong as executive chairman.
The oversharing problem
Copilot respects permissions, which sounds reassuring until an organization audits its permissions. Years of "share with everyone" links, inherited access, and orphaned sites mean many tenants effectively expose sensitive content to any employee who asks the right question. Copilot does not create the exposure. It industrializes the discovery of it.
AvePoint's Confidence Platform goes after this directly. It scans tenants for overshared and sensitive content, right-sizes permissions, applies lifecycle policies to stale data, and watches for drift once the cleanup is done. The company sells this work as Copilot readiness and says it has become one of its fastest-growing lines. Gartner has cited AvePoint in its guidance on building a Microsoft 365 Copilot and agentic-AI strategy.
Resilience as the second act
The other half of the portfolio is data protection: backup and recovery across Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Dynamics 365, and Azure. As agents start writing to business systems, recovering from an AI-caused data incident stops being hypothetical and becomes something companies plan for. A backup vendor with granular restore is suddenly relevant to AI risk. AvePoint has taken the next step with AgentPulse, which inventories the AI agents running across an environment and tracks their usage, cost, and risk.
Scale and distribution
AvePoint runs globally with about 2,800 employees and leans hard on its channel; roughly 57% of recurring revenue comes through partners. Its Elements platform lets managed service providers run many customer tenants at once, which pushes AvePoint into the mid-market where most Copilot seats will end up. The company is also a repeat Microsoft Partner of the Year, most recently in 2024. Its customer base has grown across every size, with more than 800 accounts now paying over $100,000 a year and 31 paying more than $1 million.
The financial turn
The results have followed. Revenue hit $419.5 million in 2025, up 27% from $330 million the year before, and for the first time the growth came with a profit. SaaS revenue rose 38% to $319.2 million, about 87% of the business is now recurring, and annual recurring revenue closed the year at $416.8 million. AvePoint posted its first full year of GAAP net income, generated $81.6 million in free cash flow, and turned in a Rule of 40 score of 46. It holds around $481 million in cash and expects recurring revenue to reach $525 to $531 million in 2026. That gives it room that point-solution rivals in governance don't have.
The risk in AvePoint's position is the same one every Microsoft-adjacent vendor carries: Redmond keeps absorbing adjacent functionality into E5 licenses and Purview. AvePoint's counter has been breadth across clouds and depth in remediation workflows. For enterprises budgeting a Copilot rollout in 2026, the line item marked "fix permissions first" increasingly has AvePoint's name next to it.