Amazon vets land $4M for Seattle data security startup Tensor9

Tensor9, a Seattle-based security and privacy startup, announced a $4 million seed round.

Founded in 2023 by veterans of Amazon, Meta, and Epic Games, the company helps software vendors deploy applications directly within customer cloud environments.

The idea is to “unlock” customers that deal with sensitive data and strict security policies.

“Public cloud enables simplicity, scalability, and efficiency, but also introduces security issues and data movement costs,” Tensor9 CEO Michael Ten-Pow wrote in a blog post. “There is a clear trend towards a more hybrid model, where software runs where it needs to in the right environment. And that’s the underlying premise of Tensor9: we help vendors ship software instead of requiring their customers to ship data.”

Here’s more about how the company’s software works:

How does Tensor9 make this happen? In a nutshell, a vendor points Tensor9 at their infrastructure as code (like Terraform or CloudFormation) and their app is deployed into different customer environments, with each customer getting their own private stack. Tensor9 continuously syncs updates to customer environments, ensuring consistency. A digital twin architecture mirrors the deployment and operational state of a customer’s stack, which allows vendors to sync changes to ensure consistency across customers and environments, as well as sync logs, metrics, and hardware failures back to the digital twin – enabling vendors to observe, debug, and support customers as if they were using SaaS.

Ten-Pow previously spent 13 years at Amazon, where he was an engineering working on AWS systems.

Founding engineers Matt Michie and Matt Shanker also spent time at AWS.

Investors in the seed round include Wing VC, Devang Sachdev and NVAngels, Level Up Ventures, and other individual backers.