Amazon has acquired Cambridge cybersecurity startup Sqrrl

Amazon’s Amazon Web Service announced it has acquired Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sqrrl, a cybersecurity start-up that spun out of the National Security Agency. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a message posted on its website to customers, investors, partners, and valued supporters, Mark Terenzoni, Sqrrl CEO confirmed the acquisition and said:

“We’ve reached another milestone in our journey!  We’re thrilled to share that Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon. We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we’re looking forward to working together on customer offerings for the future.

For now, it is business as usual at Sqrrl. We will continue to work with customers to provide advanced threat hunting capabilities. And, over time, we’ll work with AWS to do even more on your behalf. Thank you for your support. We really appreciate the trust customers have put into Sqrrl over the past five years, and we are excited about the next phase of our journey.”

Founded in 212 by former employee of the U.S. National Security Agency, Sqrrl provides a big data analytic tool for detecting, investigating, and visualizing advanced cybersecurity threats. It is a cybersecurity startup with U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) roots. Sqrrl’s team and underlying technology tie back to the NSA. In 2008, the NSA created Accumulo and contributed to the Apache Foundation as an incubator project in September 2011. In 2012, a core group of the creators, committers and contributors of Accumulo founded Sqrrl, according to the information of Sqrrl’s website. Sqrrl has raised capital from Spring Lake Equity Partners, Matrix Partners, Rally Ventures and Accomplice.

The company lets organizations pinpoint and react to unusual activity by automatically uncovering hidden connections in their data. Sqrrl’s linked data analysis platform gives analysts a way to visually investigate these connections, allowing them to rapidly understand their surrounding contexts and take action. With Sqrrl’s cybersecurity solution, users can detect and respond to advanced data breaches associated with cyber-espionage activity, insider threats, and other types of hard-to-detect attacks. At the core of Sqrrl’s architecture are a variety of Big Data technologies, including Hadoop, link analysis, machine learning, Data-Centric Security, and advanced visualization.

“We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we’re looking forward to working together on customer offerings for the future,” Sqrrl said in a message posted to its homepage. Axios reported in December that Amazon was in advanced talks to buy Sqrrl and said the deal could be worth more than $40 million.