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Cybersecurity startup Upwind has closed a $100m Series A funding round with the post-money valuation now in at $900 million, according to reports. A round led by Craft Ventures saw participation from TCV, Alta Park Capital, and every one of Upwind’s previous investors, including high-caliber names like Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, and Penny Jar, an investment fund connected with basketball star Stephen Curry.
This new capital brings Upwind’s total funding to $180 million, tripling its valuation since its initial seed round. The company, based in New York, intends to use the funds to expand its team, currently comprising around 150 employees. The company plans to double its workforce across its offices in the Bay Area, Iceland, the U.K., and Israel, with a particular focus on scaling its sales and marketing operations.
Upwind’s Cloud Security Focus
Upwind is taking a niche in the cloud security market, focusing on runtime security. Unlike traditional security models, which often flood organizations with alerts, Upwind’s platform filters and prioritizes threats in real-time, meaning that teams focus only on the most critical security risks. It claims its solution reduces alert overload by up to 90%.
The platform currently has robust security across a number of domains, such as the following:
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
- Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)
- Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)
API security
Vulnerability management - Identity security Container security
Upwind’s platform supports businesses in reducing vulnerabilities created through the complexity and growth of the cloud environment. As organizations expand their cloud operations, they add and remove systems. This can introduce unintentional security weaknesses. This ever-expanding attack surface has malicious hackers exploiting it. Upwind is looking to address this risk by providing real-time insights into potential threats.
Market Demand for Cloud Security
With the continuous surge in cloud computing use, cloud security has taken top priority for enterprises. Because of the fast penetration of cloud services, an increased number of attack vectors are created as new applications, services, and devices are integrated with a network. Herein, Upwind, in its league of cloud security start-ups, such as Wiz, Orca, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point, helps defend the business against cyber threats.
The cloud security market is on the rise, with companies such as Wiz raising significant investments and even turning down $23 billion offers to grow independently. This trend reflects growing confidence among investors in the long-term potential of the cloud security sector.
Unique Approach and Future Goals
Upwind’s founder and CEO, Amiram Shachar, believes that its focus on runtime alerts makes it unique in the market. Many cloud security companies focus on alert management, but that is becoming commoditized. Wiz recently acquired Dazz to enhance its alert capabilities.
However, Upwind is looking ahead and plans to extend its capabilities into more predictive alerts. Shachar said that the future efforts of the company would be directed toward enhancing the platform by AI security and advanced prevention, deep analysis into the code, and dependencies in the code, which would advance the fidelity of the delivered alerts and security responses of the platform.
It’s setting its sights on cloud security, an area it thinks offers much room for innovation, and the company believes to be a key player. Cloud computing is growing fast with frequent cyberattacks, creating huge demand for advanced and scalable security solutions.
A Bright Future for Cloud Security
Investors are optimistic about the future of cloud security, and the sector is still very early. As Morgan Gerlak, Partner at TCV, puts it, “Cloud security is going to be the most important market in security over the next decade, and runtime security is only going to grow.”. Gerlak highlighted that Upwind is even very strategic to take advantage of this opportunity and its newly innovative product matches the real-time security challenges companies today face.
Since it continues to develop its platform and reach, Upwind easily qualifies as on a trajectory to play a massive role in the emerging landscape of cloud security. With the $100 million Series A funding, Upwind is set for rapid growth that will expand its workforce and product capabilities to meet the needs of its soaring customers.
