Upwind raises $300 million, more than doubles valuation to $3.8 billion in five months
The Israeli cloud security company was valued at $1.5 billion when it raised $250 million in January, and has since attracted fresh backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, TCV, Salesforce Ventures and other prominent investors.
Israeli cloud security company Upwind has raised about $300 million at a valuation of roughly $3.8 billion.
The new financing comes less than eight months after Upwind completed a $250 million Series B at a valuation of about $1.5 billion. The latest round means the company has added roughly $2.3 billion to its valuation since the beginning of the year, as investors continue to pour capital into companies operating at the intersection of cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
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Upwind founder Amiram Shachar.
(Photo: Upwind)
The funding is being led by Bessemer Venture Partners and TCV. Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Greylock, Gili Raanan's Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund and Alta Park Capital are also participating. Among Upwind's existing investors is Penny Jar Capital, the investment firm backed by NBA star Steph Curry.
The latest financing follows an investment by Salesforce Ventures only months ago. Salesforce invested tens of millions of dollars in Upwind at a valuation of $1.6 billion.
The sequence of deals illustrates how quickly investor appetite for Upwind has accelerated. The company was valued at between $800 million and $900 million in late 2024, reached $1.5 billion in January and then $1.6 billion in a subsequent Salesforce investment. It is now worth approximately $3.8 billion.
Upwind was founded in 2022 by Amiram Shachar along with his founding partners from Spot.io (acquired by NetApp for $450 million in 2020): Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman, and Tal Zuri.
The company develops cloud security software designed to monitor live, operating environments rather than relying primarily on static scans.
Its approach, which Upwind calls “runtime-first,” is intended to help companies distinguish between vulnerabilities that actually pose a risk and those that exist only on paper. The goal is to reduce the large volume of security alerts generated by conventional approaches and focus security teams on vulnerabilities that can actually be exploited.
The company operates in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform, or CNAPP, market, bringing together functions including security posture management, workload protection, detection and response and identity security.
More recently, Upwind has expanded its focus to artificial intelligence systems. The company has worked with Nvidia on security research around AI systems, saying that the research showed its technology could detect malicious prompts targeting large language models with about 95% precision while maintaining real-time performance.
Those threats include prompt injection and data exfiltration, two of the security risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems.
