Flickr CEO, Intuit CTO spend money on new cloud infrastructure startup led by ex-AWS engineers

Seattle-area startup Momento came out of stealth mode Wednesday, announcing a $15 million seed round led by Bain Capital that will help the year-old company grow its “serverless cache” software product.

Momento co-founders Khawaja Shams and Daniela Miao previously worked at Amazon Web Services, where they helped scale Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed database service that powers Amazon.com and Prime Video.

Shams and Miao teamed up in 2021 to launch Momento, a backend-as-a-service product that allow developers to add a cache to their cloud stacks with five lines of code. The idea is to make it easier to add cloud caching services to a modern cloud stack, and reduce cloud-related expenses.

“Momento aims to fill the missing pieces in the serverless era — and empowers customers by replacing a complex caching stack with a simple abstraction,” Shams said in a statement.

Momento is built to help databases running on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. Its customers include CBS, NTT Docomo, and Wyze Labs.

Before joining Amazon in 2013, Shams spent more than seven years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a roboticist working on Mars rovers. Miao most recently was a director at Lightstep, which was acquired by ServiceNow last year.

Other investors include The General Partnership and individual angels such as Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel, Confluent co-founder Neha Narkhede, early Amazon security exec Tom Killalea, Flickr CEO Don MacAskill, and former Mozilla CEO John Lilly.

Momento has 25 employees.