Amazon quietly acquired AI security startup harvest.ai for around $20M

Amazon Web Services is to ramp up your security coasts. TechCrunch has learned that cloud computing e-commerce services group has quietly acquired cyber security company harvest.ai.





The San Diego-based company, co-founded by a team that includes two former NSA employees, uses machine-learning and artificial intelligence to analyze user behavior around a company's IP key to identify and stop Targeted attacks before valuable data.

We were alerted to the acquisition by an informant who said that the purchase price of harvest.ai was 19 million - a good performance, bearing in mind that the start-up has only raised $ 2.3 million. The forecast also said that the 12 employees of the team moved to the Amazon headquarters in Seattle.

Amazon said TechCrunch, in response to our questions about how to start, that does not comment on rumors and speculation. Co-Founders harvest.ai, in contact with this agreement, did not answer our questions.

However, we have several evidences that indicate an acquisition.

- A second source who wishes to remain anonymous says the case is closed. The source added that the value was closer to $ 20 million.

- Trinity Ventures, the initiator of the start-up, note harvest.ai is "acquired" on the portfolio page, but does not specify by whom.

- Another investor in the start-up, Kelly Perdew LA Capital Moonshots, also listed the company as "acquired by undisclosed" on their LinkedIn page.

- Several ex-harvest.ai software developers are already listed as AWS employees on their LinkedIn pages - both from the AWS in April 2016.

None of the co-founders cites Amazon as a workplace on LinkedIn (not available to the public), but we have been able to uncover evidence that two of the co-founders, Anna Zelenak and Alex Watson (married) in the year 2016 moved to Seattle, where the seat is Amazon. A third, Jenny Brinkley, Amazon lists as its pattern in the database contributions policy.

Harvest.ai had already been an AWS customer, offering in its "Spotlight Startup" series, whose aim is to promote the platform for entrepreneurs who are scaling companies with limited resources.

The Twitter account startup seems to have stopped chirping in March of last year - the same month there was also a change in the domain name registration to its previous name. (The registration of the domain name harvest.ai seems to have changed in June of last year).

The flagship product Harvest.ai, patent pending, is named Macie Analytics. Uses AI to monitor how a client's intellectual property is accessible in real time, evaluate the viewer, copy or move individual documents, and where they are when they do, to identify suspicious behavior patterns information and possible data breaches before they occur. It charges the service as a way to fight the risk of internal attacks.

"Macie can automatically identify the risk for business data being displayed or shared outside the organization and the correct policy-based almost in real time," he wrote on his website.

"Macie integrates with its cloud systems and on-site, by examining connection patterns, remote access to the network, access to data and documents to detect attacks and prepare a complete application for a thorough review .

The launch launched its service in March 2015, when it also renamed its old name of 405Labs and detailed its seed cycle of 2.3 million. According to CrunchBase, the company was founded in September 2014. (One has to wonder if the inspiration of the founders came from ASN traitor Edward Snowden, sweeping all the classified material from his former employer in 2013 ...)

As for how Amazon AWS can apply crops, there are a couple of areas.

The first one is in the security features of the Amazon service. AWS already offers built-in security features and tools to users of its cloud service platform. While there are third parties that offer security features for cloud services, Amazon also moved in this area, considering how important it is to be trusted by customers to lock their key business assets.

as demand for AI engineers continues to run well over capacity across the tech industry.