Amazon has signed a licensing deal with a small Seattle startup called Intentionet, the company behind the Batfish open source project that helps engineers design and test networks.
Batfish will become an open source project managed by Amazon Web Services and remain available under the same open source license.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the deal. Less than 12 employees from Intentionet will be joining Amazon as a result of the deal, which is not being described as an acquisition.
Intentionet’s enterprise product can predict the impact of a network change before it is deployed in production, helping flag outages and security vulnerabilities.
Founded in 2017, Intentionet is led by CEO Ratul Mahajan, a former principal researcher at Microsoft and currently an associate professor with the University of Washington’s computer science school. He co-founded Intentionet with Todd Millstein, a computer science professor at UCLA, and Ari Fogel, a former graduate student researcher at UCLA. Mahajan and Millstein received Ph.Ds from the UW.
The company raised $3 million in 2017 in a round led by True Ventures’ Om Malik.
