Harvest.ai Investor Reveals Why Amazon Acquired Cybersecurity Startup

Amazon made an acquisition last year without getting it publicized. The electronic commerce giant did not spill the beans about the deal, but somehow some details managed to surface this Monday after the company showed off Alexa’s growth and expansion at CES 2017 last week.

According to multiple sources, the Seattle-headquartered company bought San Diego-based cybersecurity startup Harvest.ai in early 2016. The acquisition was made stealthily, so it wasn’t made known until recently when investors and tipsters have come out to gush about the deal.

If Harvest.ai investor Fred Wang is to be asked, the acquisition was made so Amazon could bolster cloud security for its patrons. Wang is a general partner with Trinity Ventures, the cybersecurity startup’s lead investor. Although he did not divulge the specifics or confirm the price of the deal, he told GeekWire that “it was a good win for the investors and for the management team.”

The acquisition is indeed a good deal for the startup. A tipster with knowledge on the issue has disclosed that the money involved was $19 million. Considering that Harvest.ai has only raised $2.3 million, the value acquisition really benefited the startup.

Amazon and Harvest.ai had already established a good relationship back in 2015. For people who have been religiously following Amazon’s blog posts, the big company has featured the startup in a post about “startups all over the world” that are building businesses “on top of cloud infrastructure.” At the time, Harvest.ai was included in the post because of its app that utilizes multiple Amazon services.

It isn’t clear then why Amazon, when contacted, said that it does not respond to rumors and speculations and did not even bother to comment on Harvest.ai. However, TechCrunch got out of the way to prove that the acquisition indeed took place. Per the tech site’s investigation, the 12 employees of the San Diego startup have since relocated to the Seattle headquarters of Amazon.

Founded in September 2014, Harvest.ai is a company that specializes in AI algorithms to protect data stored in cloud services. The firm works to prevent cyber attacks and inadvertent exposure of important documents and information. Its flagship product is the MACIE Analytics that’s designed to “automatically identify risk to the business of data that is being exposed or shared outside the organization and remediate based on policies in near real-time,” as described on its website.

“The company works in an area called data-leakage prevention,” Wang said of the startup. “At one time a lot of companies got into it, but most of them didn’t get much traction. Harvest.ai automated looking at file-access patterns to detect which are normal and which are not.” Wang then confirmed that Amazon is selling Harvest.ai’s technology, but he wasn’t sure if it is already part of the electronic commerce and cloud computing company’s offerings.