Amazon has quietly acquired Harvest.ai security startup
Big tech companies acquire startups quite often, with some purchases being more publicized than others depending on the stakes of the transaction or the popularity of the companies involve. The newest acquisition in the tech industry comes from Amazon which seeks to increase its protection systems through the Harvest.ai security startup.
Although the acquisition was not publicly revealed, Techcrunch was able to obtain some of the details of the deal. According to them, Amazon acquired the Harvest.ai security startup for $19 million, which is considerably more than the $2.3 million that the company managed to attract as seed funding.
The startup was initially based in San Diego, and was funded in 2014 by a team which includes even two former NSA employees, and has a total of 12 employees, which will be relocating to Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. Before the acquisition, Harvest.ai used artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in order to analyze the behavior of users in correlation with a company’s key IP as a way to identify and stop attacks before manage to steal customer data.
Although neither Amazon nor Harvest.ai issued any statements or comments on the acquisition, refusing to answer any of Techcrunch’s inquiries, there are considerable signs that the deal has been already finalized, such as information posted by employees and third-party companies regarding the status of the startup.
Harvest.ai’s main AI product still has a patent pending and its known as MACIE Analytics. It mainly uses AI system to monitor how a company’s intellectual property is accessed by customers in real-time. The AI is able to determine what every user is accessing, moving, or copying specific documents. It can even determine where and when they are doing this kind of operations. These AI systems are meant to identify suspicious behavior in order to prevent data breaches and leaks.
The MACIE Analytics is able to integrate with both cloud as well as on-premise system, where it starts to examine various patterns of logins, access to documents and overall data, and remote network access to determine any possible sources of attacks. Thus, it is very likely that Harvest.ai will be tasked with increasing the security of Amazon’s cloud platform.
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