Upwind raises $250M at $1.5B valuation to continue building ‘runtime’ cloud security

Upwind Security, a burgeoning name in cloud security, has achieved a significant milestone, raising $250 million in its latest funding round, pushing its valuation to an impressive $1.5 billion. Despite its current success, co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar reflects on the challenges the company faced early on, recalling moments of doubt about their direction. Three years prior, Shachar and his team grappled with uncertainties about their market fit and product integration. 'We often questioned if our solution was truly needed or if customers would embrace it,' he admitted in a recent interview. The startup's innovative approach, termed 'runtime' security, focuses on managing threats in real time by prioritizing alerts based on active service vulnerabilities. Shachar describes this as an 'inside-out' method, utilizing internal signals like network requests to help security teams differentiate between urgent risks and those that can be addressed later. The path to developing this strategy was fraught with difficulties, especially since Shachar and his co-founders lacked traditional security backgrounds. Their previous venture, Spot.io, a cloud compute brokerage sold to NetApp for $450 million, provided valuable insights into the complexities of cloud security. Shachar noticed that security teams often lacked the context needed to identify real risks, leading to an overload of flagged issues. He points out the limitations of the prevalent 'agentless' model, which only offers an external view of the environment. 'While it’s simple to implement, it creates noise by only showing what’s visible from the outside,' Shachar explained. This realization led Upwind to harness internal data for more effective security measures. However, the challenge remained: convincing security teams to adopt their novel approach. Many teams were hesitant to deploy new software internally, gravitating instead towards established tools. 'Initial skepticism was high, and gaining trust took time,' said Shachar. Despite these hurdles, Upwind's vision resonated with large organizations that manage extensive cloud infrastructures. Since its $100 million Series A funding round in 2024, Upwind has experienced remarkable growth, boasting a staggering 900% increase in year-over-year revenue and doubling its client base. The company has extended its reach from its primary markets in the U.S., U.K., and Israel to include emerging markets like Australia, India, Singapore, and Japan. The recent funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with contributions from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital, will be pivotal for Upwind. The capital will be directed towards enhancing its product offerings and advancing its AI capabilities within the cloud security framework, aiming to assist developers in preventing misconfigurations before they hit production.