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From the outside, Upwind Security looks like it\u2019s had a smooth journey so far. Just four years in, the cloud security startup is now worth $1.5 billion, and boasts the likes of Siemens, Peloton, Roku, Wix, Nextdoor and Nubank among its clientele. But if you ask the company\u2019s co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar, the journey to get here was anything but certain.<\/p>\n
\u201cThree years ago, we would spend hours asking ourselves if we were heading in the right direction, and 80% of the time, it felt like we weren\u2019t,\u201d a candid Shachar told TechCrunch in an interview following the startup\u2019s recent $250 million Series B. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the beginning, we constantly questioned whether the market needed our solution, whether it would be too hard to integrate into larger systems, or if customers would adopt it,\u201d he recalled. \u201cDeveloping a new approach was difficult; people are used to installing certain agents on machines, but they don\u2019t like doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Upwind likes to call that approach \u201cruntime\u201d security: Prioritizing alerts and remediation efforts around threats and vulnerabilities in active services in real time. As Shachar puts it, it\u2019s an \u201cinside-out\u201d take on cloud security, where internal signals like network requests and API traffic function as context to help security teams separate urgent risks from those that can wait. <\/p>\n
Developing that approach wasn\u2019t easy, however, as Shachar and his co-founders didn\u2019t have a traditional background in security: they first built and sold a cloud compute brokerage called Spot.io, to NetApp<\/a> for around $450 million in 2020. <\/p>\n \u201cAfter joining NetApp post the Spot acquisition, I experienced first-hand how difficult cloud security really is,\u201d Shachar said. \u201cThe security team would scan our environment and report issues, but they lacked critical context. Coming from a DevOps background, we (Shachar and his team) understood the infrastructure deeply, while security teams often didn\u2019t know how APIs were exposed or which packages were running. As a result, they flagged many issues that weren\u2019t real risks.\u201d<\/p>\n But Shachar and his team felt they had better insight into cloud environments because they were running them. \u201cThe dominant approach was agentless, an \u2018outside-in\u2019 model where you scan environments externally,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to deploy, but it creates a lot of noise because you can only see what\u2019s visible from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA<\/span> The team realized that the context provided by internal signals would be more useful to security teams, as they\u2019d get to see what was happening in the network, in real time. But selling their new take on cloud security proved challenging, as security teams often lack permission to deploy software internally and default to more traditional tools. <\/p>\n So Upwind sales took time. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t clear at first, and there was a lot of uncertainty; customers were hesitant,\u201d Shachar said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we saw something others didn\u2019t,\u201d he explained. \u201cInside-out isn\u2019t an advanced option; it\u2019s the only way to solve the next generation of problems. With ephemeral infrastructure like containers, serverless workloads, AI agents talking to each other, and data constantly moving through APIs, you simply can\u2019t map this from the outside. It has to be inside.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the company had to contend with an overcrowded security market. Security teams were already overwhelmed by the number of tools, and customers didn\u2019t want multiple products just to manage cloud security. \u201cFrom the beginning, it was clear that Upwind would need to build a broad, integrated platform,\u201d Shachar said. \u201cOtherwise, customers wouldn\u2019t engage or allow us to deploy our technology.\u201d<\/p>\n The company\u2019s logic eventually spoke to its target customers: large, data-intensive organizations with sizable cloud footprints. Since its $100 million Series A in 2024<\/a>, Upwind has grown rapidly, posting 900% year-over-year revenue growth and doubling its customer base. The company has also expanded from its core markets in the U.S., U.K. and Israel to emerging markets including Australia, India, Singapore, and Japan. <\/p>\n The $250 million Series B was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital. The fresh cash will be used for product development and go-to-market motions, and the startup plans to invest in its AI security capabilities within its core cloud security platform and \u201cextend its approach closer to developers to help prevent misconfigurations before they reach production.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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