Amazon has quietly sought to make improvements to its security with the acquisition of San Diego startup Harvest.ai for a figure believed to be around $20m (£17m).

According to TechCrunch sources, the acquisition was made through Amazon’s cloud services group, Amazon Web Services, and will see Harvest.ai’s 12 employees relocate to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Furthermore, Trinity Ventures and Moonshots Capital, the two behind Harvest.ai’s 2015 $2.3m investment, both list the firm as acquired on respective pages.

Harvest.ai, co-founded by a team that includes two NSA employees, uses AI to identify and stop data breaches before customer data can be taken. The patent pending AI, called Macie Analytics, does this by analysing user behaviour around a company’s key IP.

“Macie understands the business value of all data across a network and whether it makes sense for a user to be accessing certain documents, a key indicator of a targeted attack,” Harvest.ai writes on its website. “Macie 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.

“Macie not only detects changes in a single users behavior, but it has the unique ability to detect minor shifts in groups of users, which can indicate an attack.”