Cloud-security startup Upwind raises $400 million Series C four years after its founding

Upwind, a San Francisco cloud-security company founded in October 2022, raised a $400 million Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners, the company said in a post by co-founder and chief executive Amiram Shachar on October 28.

What happened

Shachar wrote that the round came "less than 9 months since we announced our $250M Series B." Bessemer led, with participation from "each and every Upwind's investor," he wrote, among them Greylock Partners, Cyberstarts, Craft, Salesforce Ventures, TCV and Leaders Fund, and Canapi Ventures joined as a new investor. The company said total funding is now over $800 million.

TechCrunch reported that the round values Upwind at $3.8 billion, against $1.5 billion at the previous financing; Upwind's own post does not state a valuation. TechCrunch, citing a person familiar with the company, also reported that Datadog had tried to buy Upwind without offering a premium to that valuation. Upwind's post does not mention it.

How it started

Upwind says it was founded by the team behind Spot.io, a cloud-cost optimization company that was acquired by NetApp. Its newsroom page lists a founding date of October 2022 in San Francisco.

Shachar described the beginning in the January post announcing the Series B: he told Omri Casspi about the idea during a family trip to San Diego, and Casspi introduced him to Gili Raanan at Cyberstarts, "who took 45 minutes to make a decision." The company followed the same pattern at the Series A, with Craft, he wrote.

Shachar wrote that the company was responding to cloud infrastructure becoming more complex while "many of the security models designed to protect these environments were built for a much simpler time."

How it grew

The January Series B post said Upwind had come out of stealth two years earlier and that the $250 million round brought total investment to over $430 million. The newsroom page lists more than 600 employees and more than 400 customers.

The October post puts total funding at over $800 million, which the company said makes it "one of the most capitalized companies in the world that's focused on solving the cloud and AI security problem."

TechCrunch reported, citing a person familiar with the company's financials, that Upwind adds $20 million to $30 million in annualized recurring revenue each quarter and is projected to end the year at roughly $90 million. Upwind has not published a revenue figure.

What the founders say

Shachar wrote of the work behind the round: "There's no shortcut, just hard work." He said the company is "competing with the largest and most successful companies on earth," and credited customers: "I owe this Series C to our customers and partners for believing in us."

Two customers are quoted in the post. Michael Cannizzo, chief information security officer at HedgeServ, said Upwind gave "visibility into what is actually running, not just what a scan found." Russ Kirby, chief information security officer of Ping Identity, said "the setup only took days."

What's next

Upwind said the capital will go to product and engineering. Shachar wrote that the company is building "AI Sensors for endpoints, Agents and Skills scanners" and reinventing its inventory graph, and described three software agents, called Blue, Red and Green, that investigate attacks, test whether exposures can be exploited and propose fixes for large numbers of findings.

The company also said it launched "AI Labs for Cybersecurity," focused on AI security, agentic security, frontier models and advanced AI systems. Shachar wrote that Upwind will expand "to additional areas surrounding identity, data, and AI."