Upwind, an Israeli-founded cloud security startup, said Monday it raised $250 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of about $1.5 billion, pushing the company into unicorn status.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included participation from returning investors such as Greylock Partners, Cyberstarts and Leaders Fund, with Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital joining as new backers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Upwind said the financing brought its total capital raised to $430 million in under three years.
Upwind is led by CEO and co-founder Amiram Shachar, whose previous startup, Spot.io, was acquired by NetApp in 2020 for $450 million, the WSJ reported. Calcalist has reported Upwind was founded in 2022 by Shachar together with Spot.io alumni Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman and Tal Zuri.
'Runtime-first' in plain terms
Upwind positions its platform as “runtime-first” cloud security, meaning it prioritizes signals drawn from how cloud workloads behave while they are running. Upwind says this helps security teams cut down on noisy alerts and focus on higher-risk issues in fast-changing environments, a problem many security leaders say has grown sharper as cloud adoption deepens and AI-driven workloads expand.
Shachar said the company planned to use the fresh funding to expand globally and keep investing in product and engineering, including work tied to data and AI. The company has grown to more than 300 employees, the WSJ reported.
Upwind said it has seen rapid expansion since its previous major round and that its platform is now used by global enterprises, including Siemens, Peloton, Roku and Nubank.
Cyberstarts: 'a meaningful change,' says Gili Raanan
Cyberstarts founder Gili Raanan said the firm was Upwind’s first investor and has been involved since the company’s early days. In a statement, Raanan said the team was positioned to “drive a meaningful change in cloud security,” and he described Upwind’s new unicorn status as the seventh unicorn to emerge from Cyberstarts’ portfolio.
Elliott Robinson, a partner at Bessemer who led the round, said Upwind stood out for a runtime-first approach that matches the reality of cloud environments that change quickly.
A market moving fast
Upwind’s fundraise lands as cloud security continues to attract heavy investment and as many large organizations look to consolidate security tools into fewer platforms. The WSJ cited research from Grand View Research projecting that the broader cloud security market will keep expanding in the coming years.
Within cloud security, analysts have highlighted the rapid growth of cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP), a category that combines tools for securing cloud infrastructure, workloads and applications. Dell’Oro Group has projected the CNAPP market will expand sharply through 2029, driven in part by demand for better visibility and audit-ready configuration at scale.
Upwind said it plans to use its new capital to keep building out its product and accelerate growth as demand rises for cloud security that can keep pace with modern, highly dynamic infrastructure.