Amazon Met with Startups About Investing, then Launched Competing Products

by Lucas Nolan

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal alleges that e-commerce giant Amazon met with small startups seeking investments to gain insight into their products before later launching its own competing products.

A recent report from the Wall Street Journal titled “Amazon Met With Startups About Investing, Then Launched Competing Products,” outlines how the e-commerce giant Amazon set up meetings with startup firms to discuss their products with the pretense of potentially investing in the companies, only later to launch competing products in similar markets.

The WSJ writes that when Amazon’s venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd Corp. it gained access to the tech startup’s finances along with other confidential information. Four years later, Amazon’s cloud-computing unit launched an artificial intelligence product that does exactly what DefinedCrowd does, according to DefinedCrowd founder and CEO Daniela Braga.

The WSJ writes:

The new offering from Amazon Web Services, called A2I, competes directly “with one of our bread-and-butter foundational products” that collects and labels data, said Ms. Braga. After seeing the A2I announcement, Ms. Braga limited the Amazon fund’s access to her company’s data and diluted its stake by 90% by raising more capital.

Ms. Braga is one of more than two dozen entrepreneurs, investors and deal advisers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal who said Amazon appeared to use the investment and deal-making process to help develop competing products.

full story at https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/07/24/wsj-amazon-met-with-startups-about-investing-then-launched-competing-products/