Last November, we broke the news that cybersecurity startup Upwind was receiving a lot of inbound interest to raise funding at a high valuation. You can now confirm that your transaction has been completed. Upwind closes $100 million Series A. The company valued the round at $900 million post-money.
Craft Ventures, an investment firm started by David Sacks, is leading the deal, with TCV, Alta Park Capital, and Upwind’s previous backers all participating. Past investors include Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi’s Sheva Fund and basketball star Stephen Curry’s investment fund Penny Jar, confirming previous reports. The company has now raised $180 million, and its valuation is three times that of its previous seed round.
New York-based Upwind plans to use the funds to focus on sales and marketing operations and grow its team. It currently has about 150 employees and plans to double that across the Bay Area, Iceland, the United Kingdom and Israel.
We will also continue to develop the platform, which is currently focused on “runtime” security. This means we prioritize alerts and remediation efforts for threats and vulnerabilities in active services in real time. Organizations typically struggle with a deluge of alerts across their networks, and Upwind claims to be able to reduce this by 90%, allowing them to focus on only the most important alerts. He currently focuses on the areas of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), API Security, Vulnerability Management, Identity Security, and Container Security.
The fact that Upwind is currently valued at $900 million in its Series A highlights that cloud security is currently gaining attention from investors. This is because cloud security is gaining attention from enterprise developers and CISOs.
Simply put, cloud computing has become an indispensable tool for organizations looking to scale up and down quickly or adopt (or drop) services on the fly. However, the growth of the cloud computing market has proven to be a minefield for security teams.
The attack “surface” (around an organization’s systems, which can include devices, apps, networks, infrastructure, connections to partners, etc.) grows and becomes more complex. And as more components are added, removed, or updated, unintended vulnerabilities arise.
Malicious hackers are ready to exploit all of this, so cloud security companies must find ways to stay one step ahead to keep people and businesses secure.
Upwind is one of the larger, more established companies building cloud security startups and the tools to achieve them. Other companies in the same space include Wiz, Orca, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point.
Upwind’s optimism about the market is partly due to the broader business environment. Many of the most successful companies are seeing huge windfalls on the investment and business side. Wiz, which claims to be one of the fastest-growing startups in history (it’s less than five years old and says it’s on track to reach $1 billion in ARR by next year), turned down a $23 billion offer from Google. I believe it can become bigger in itself.
Amiram Shachar, founder and CEO of Upwind, believes the company’s focus on runtime warnings makes it unique among its competitors. In fact, focusing solely on warnings is quickly becoming commoditized. Just last week, Wiz acquired Dazz to increase alert rates. But I think we could also extend this to more predictable warnings. In an interview, he said part of the investment will be used to “keep up with the basic principles of cloud security.”
“By the end of this year and into next year, we will be moving towards AI security and advanced prevention, examining the code and its dependencies to provide higher fidelity (to the platform),” he said. “This is where we’re going.”
Given the rate and scope of cyber breaches, investors are confident that there will be room for more companies and more innovation in the future.
“Cloud security is still in its infancy. Over the next 10 years, we believe this will grow to be the most important market in security,” Morgan Gerlak, partner at TCV, said in a statement. “We also believe that the demand for cloud security will shift to runtime. Upwind has expertly timed our products, and Amiram and his team have a lot of work to do.”
