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Amazon Web Services<\/a>\u00a0appears to be ramping up its security chops. TechCrunch has learned that the e-commerce giant\u2019s cloud services group quietly acquired\u00a0cyber security firm\u00a0harvest.ai<\/a>.<\/p>\n The San Diego-based startup, co-founded by a team that includes two\u00a0former NSA employees, uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze user behavior around a company\u2019s key IP to try to identify and stop targeted attacks before valuable customer data\u00a0can be swiped.<\/p>\n We were alerted\u00a0to the acquisition by a tipster, who\u00a0said the purchase price for harvest.ai was\u00a0$19 million \u2014 a good return, considering that the startup only\u00a0raised $2.3 million<\/a>. The tipster\u00a0also said the team\u2019s 12 employees are\u00a0relocating to Amazon\u2019s Seattle headquarters.<\/p>\n Amazon told TechCrunch, in response to our questions about the startup, that it does not comment on rumors and speculation. Co-founders for harvest.ai, contacted about this deal, did not respond to our questions.<\/p>\n However, we have several pieces of evidence that point to an acquisition.<\/p>\n \u2014 A\u00a0second source that wishes to remain anonymous tells us the deal is closed. The source added that the value was closer to $20 million.<\/p>\n \u2014 The startup\u2019s lead seed investor, Trinity Ventures<\/a>, notes harvest.ai\u00a0as \u2018acquired\u2019 on its portfolio page but\u00a0does not specify by whom.<\/p>\n \u2014 Another investor in the startup, Kelly Perdew of LA\u2019s\u00a0Moonshots Capital<\/a>, also lists the firm as \u2018acquired by undisclosed\u2019 on his LinkedIn page<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Several\u00a0former harvest.ai software developers are already listed as employees of\u00a0AWS on their LinkedIn pages \u2014 two commencing at AWS in April 2016.<\/p>\n None of the co-founders list Amazon as a workplace on LinkedIn (not in publicly accessible way, at least), but we\u2019ve been able to uncover evidence that two of the co-founders, Anna Zelenak and Alex Watson (who are married), in 2016 relocated to Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered. A third, Jenny Brinkley, lists<\/a>\u00a0Amazon as her employer on a political contributions database.<\/p>\n Harvest.ai had already\u00a0been a\u00a0customer of AWS,\u00a0featuring<\/a> in its \u2018startup spotlight\u2019 series, which aims to publicize\u00a0the platform\u00a0to entrepreneurs who are scaling businesses with limited resources.<\/p>\n The startup\u2019s\u00a0Twitter account<\/a>\u00a0appears to have stopped tweeting in March last year \u2014 the same month\u00a0there was also a\u00a0change in registration for the\u00a0domain name<\/a>\u00a0of its prior name. (The harvest.ai domain name registration appears to have changed in June last year.)<\/p>\n Harvest.ai\u2019s\u00a0flagship, patent-pending AI product is called MACIE Analytics. It uses AI to monitor how a customer\u2019s intellectual property is being accessed in real-time, assessing who is looking at, copying or moving\u00a0particular documents, and where they are when they\u2019re doing this, in order to identify suspicious patterns of behavior and flag\u00a0potential data breaches before they\u2019ve taken place. It bills the service as a way to combat the risk of insider attacks.<\/p>\n \u201cMACIE can 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,\u201d it writes on its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMACIE integrates with your cloud and on-premise systems, examining patterns of logins, remote network access, access to data and documents to discover attacks and compile a comprehensive case for further review.\u201d<\/p>\n The startup launched its service in March 2015, when it also rebranded from its prior name of 405Labs and detailed its $2.3M seed<\/a>\u00a0round. According to CrunchBase<\/a>, the business was founded in September 2014.\u00a0(You do have to wonder if the founders\u2019 inspiration came from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden swiping all those classified documents from their ex employer, back in 2013\u2026 )<\/p>\n As for how\u00a0Amazon may apply harvest.ai at AWS, there are a couple of areas.<\/p>\n The first of these is in Amazon\u2019s own security-as-a-service features. AWS already offers embedded security features and tools<\/a> for users\u00a0of its\u00a0cloud services platform. Although there are third parties who offer security features for cloud services, Amazon has also moved into this area, given how vital it is for customers to trust it\u00a0to lock down their key business assets.<\/p>\n And, as ever with security, it\u2019s an arms race to keep on top of evolving threats, so it may be that harvest.ai was acquired to beef up those capabilities. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has described security as one of the five supporting pillars<\/a> of every\u00a0service it builds for customers.<\/p>\n Last fall, for example, the company announced\u00a0Amazon Inspector<\/a>: a service that analyzes a customer\u2019s\u00a0AWS instances and reports back with any security or compliance issues, generating a vulnerability report. A more sophisticated, AI-powered threat alert service such as\u00a0harvest.ai\u2019s user behavior monitoring system could similarly be incorporated into the AWS\u00a0platform itself \u2014 or\u00a0sold\u00a0as a standalone service.<\/p>\n There is also the wider area of AI and how Amazon is monetising that. While Alexa and the Amazon Echo hub are fast becoming household names<\/a>, there is a second track of AI development at Amazon, at the AWS enterprise level. Last November<\/a>,\u00a0Amazon launched the\u00a0Amazon AI platform as a way to monetize its in-house\u00a0AI smarts by making different\u00a0services available as services to outsiders. The first three offerings were\u00a0image recognition, text-to-speech,\u00a0and voice recognition.<\/p>\n At the\u00a0launch of that platform, AWS\u00a0CEO Andy Jassy said: \u201cWe do a lot of AI in our company. We have thousands of people dedicated to AI in our business.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond harvest.ai offering another Amazon another AI-powered string for its\u00a0services bow, the startup\u2019s team of 12 will be\u00a0topping up Bezos Co.\u2019s\u00a0in-house AI talent, which in itself is no small detail, as demand for AI engineers continues to\u00a0run well over capacity across the tech industry.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: TEK IMAGE\/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/V7dQtHleB0Y\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazon Web Services\u00a0appears to be ramping up its security chops. TechCrunch has learned that the e-commerce giant\u2019s cloud services group quietly acquired\u00a0cyber security firm\u00a0harvest.ai. The San Diego-based startup, co-founded by <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-2695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t