Upwind

Upwind was founded in September 2022 in San Francisco by Amiram Shachar (CEO) together with Lavi Ferdman, Liran Polak, and Tal Zur — the founding team behind Spot.io (originally Spotinst), a cloud infrastructure cost-optimization company Shachar started in 2015 that was acquired by NetApp in 2020 for a reported $450 million. After running NetApp's cloud strategy post-acquisition, the team regrouped to apply their DevOps/cloud-infrastructure expertise to cybersecurity, betting on eBPF-based runtime telemetry as the foundation for a new approach to cloud security ('runtime-first' security) rather than the agentless, snapshot-based approaches common among incumbents.

Funding history (reconstructed from Upwind's own blog posts, its lead investors' blogs, Crunchbase, and press coverage, which together are broadly but not perfectly consistent on exact round labels): (1) A ~$30M seed round announced around September 2022, co-led by Greylock, Cyberstarts and Leaders Fund, with participation from Cerca Partners, Omri Casspi's Sheva VC, and Stephen Curry's Penny Jar. Greylock General Partner Saam Motamedi called it the largest seed round Greylock had done for a software company. (2) A $50M round announced September 5, 2023 (led by Leaders Fund per Leaders Fund's own account, joined by Craft Ventures, Cyberstarts, Greylock, Sheva, Cerca and Penny Jar), bringing cumulative funding to $80M within the company's first 12 months. (3) A $100M round announced December 2, 2024, which Upwind, Craft Ventures and TechCrunch all label a 'Series A,' led by Craft Ventures (David Sacks / Mike Robinson) and joined by new investors TCV and Alta Park Capital plus all prior backers; this round valued Upwind at $900M post-money and brought total funding to $180M (TechCrunch first reported the deal was in progress on Nov 8, 2024 at an $850-900M valuation, then confirmed the close on Dec 2, 2024). (4) A $250M Series B announced January 26, 2026, led by Bessemer Venture Partners (partners Elliott Robinson, Sameer Dholakia, Alex Yuditski) and joined by new investor Picture Capital (backed by the founders of Island and Transmit Security) and Salesforce Ventures, alongside continuing investors Craft Ventures, TCV, Alta Park Capital, Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, Cerca, Sheva and Penny Jar. This round valued Upwind at $1.5B, making it (per CEO Amiram Shachar) 'the first unicorn in modern cloud security,' and brought total funding to over $430M. Because Upwind's own materials apply the label 'Series A' to both the 2023 and 2024 raises in different places, and third-party aggregators (e.g., Crunchbase) show four rounds without fully disclosing which round carries which official name, there is some residual ambiguity in exact round-by-round labeling, though the amounts, dates, and investor lists themselves are well corroborated across multiple independent sources.

In April 2025, Upwind made its first acquisition, purchasing Nyx Security, a Tel-Aviv-based startup founded in 2024 that built eBPF-based, function-level application-runtime threat detection ('Application Detection and Response'), extending Upwind's runtime protection from cloud infrastructure into the application layer. Terms were not disclosed. In June 2025, Upwind hired Rinki Sethi (former CISO at Bill, Twitter/X, and other companies) as Chief Security Officer. In July 2025, Calcalist (Israeli business outlet) reported that data-analytics company Datadog was in talks to acquire Upwind for roughly $1 billion; no deal materialized, and Upwind instead continued raising independently, going on to close its $250M Series B at a $1.5B valuation about six months later — indicating the earlier acquisition talks either fell through or were superseded by Upwind's decision to stay independent.

Business model

B2B enterprise SaaS. Upwind sells a unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) via direct enterprise sales and through cloud marketplaces (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud), targeting security, DevOps and platform engineering teams at mid-market to Fortune 500 organizations running large-scale, multi-cloud and containerized/Kubernetes environments.

Subscription/consumption-based licensing of its cloud security platform, sold directly and via cloud marketplace listings (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI); expansion revenue driven by adding additional security modules (CSPM, CWPP, CDR, CIEM, DSPM, API security, AI-SPM, MDR) on top of a single runtime agent deployment.