Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) has reached a licensing deal with the Seattle startup behind an open source project, and will take on its employees.
Batfish, the open source project started by Intentionet, will be managed by Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud division, according to the project's website. Batfish helps predict and test outages and security breaches in network changes before they're deployed.
Geekwire first reported the news.
AWS wasn't clear about whether all of Intentionet's 11 employees, including the founders, would be joining the tech giant. However, Batfish's website said the Intentionet team was joining AWS.
"We are excited to continue, under a new umbrella, our mission of transforming how networks are engineered," the announcement said. Batfish "will remain available under the same open source license, and we will continue our work on the project in collaboration with the community."
But the deal isn't an acquisition. Amazon secured the source code license, which allows Amazon to control the use, design and development of the Batfish code for its own products.
Intentionet was founded in 2017 by CEO Ratul Mahajan, chief scientist Todd Millstein and Ari Fogel, the chief technology officer. It also has five software engineers, a head of engineering, a UX/UI designer and a head of product listed on its website. Mahajan is a former principal researcher at Microsoft and a current computer science associate professor at the University of Washington.
The startup raised $3 million in 2017 in a seed round led by True Ventures. It's also received grants worth about $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation. At one point it had office space in downtown Seattle at 999 Third Ave.
