In November, cybersecurity startup Upwind broke the news about how it was attracting a lot of inbound interest to raise funding at a high valuation. You can now confirm that the transaction has been completed. Upwind has closed a $100 million Series A. The company confirmed that the round is valued at $900 million post-money.
Craft Ventures, the investment firm founded by David Sachs, is leading the deal, with participation from TCV, Alta Park Capital, and all of Upwind's previous backers. Past investors include Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi's Sheva Fund, basketball star Stephen Curry's investment fund, and Penny Jar, which confirms previous reports. The company has now raised $180 million, and this latest valuation is triple its previous seed round.
New York-based Upwind plans to use the funding to grow its team. The company currently has about 150 employees, but plans to double its workforce across the Bay Area, Iceland, the United Kingdom and Israel, with a focus on sales and marketing operations.
We also continue to develop our platform, now focused on “runtime” security, to alert on active service threats and vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation efforts in real-time. Organizations are typically hit with a blizzard of alerts across their networks, so Upwind claims to be able to reduce these alerts by 90%, allowing you to focus on only the most important alerts. His current focus is in 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.
Upwind's current Series A valuation of $900 million confirms that cloud security is currently receiving attention from investors. This is also because cloud security is gaining attention from enterprise developers and CISOs.
In short, cloud computing has become an essential tool for organizations that want to quickly scale up, scale down, or introduce (or remove) services on the fly. However, the growth of the cloud computing market has proven to be a minefield for security teams.
The “surface” of an attack – the periphery of organizational systems that includes devices, apps, networks, infrastructure, partner connections, etc. – is growing and becoming more complex. As more components are added and removed, and updates are made, inadvertent vulnerabilities are introduced.
Malicious hackers are ready to exploit all of this, so cloud security companies need to figure out how to stay one step ahead of them to keep people and businesses safe.
Upwind is one of a legion of cloud security startups and larger, established companies building tools to do just that. The same space includes Wiz, Orca, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, and more.
Upwind's optimism about the market is also due to the broader business environment, with many of the most successful companies reaping huge returns on investment and business. Wiz claims to be one of the fastest growing startups in history (it's less than five years old, but it's on track to reach $1 billion in ARR by next year) ) turned down a $23 billion offer from Google for the following reasons: I believe it can become even bigger on its own.
Amiram Shachar, founder and CEO of Upwind, believes his company's focus on runtime alerts makes it unique among its competitors. In fact, focusing solely on alerts is rapidly becoming a commodity. Just last week, Wiz acquired Dazz to enhance its alert strike rate. But it looks like it will also extend to more predictive alerts. He said in an interview that some of the investment will go toward “catching up on some of the basics of cloud security.”
“By the end of this year, and next year, we will be moving into AI security and advanced defenses, going deeper into the code and the dependencies within the code, to achieve even higher fidelity.” [to the platform]” he said. “This is where we're going.”
Given the speed and scope of cyber breaches, investors are confident there will be room for more companies and further innovation in the coming years.
“Cloud security is still in its infancy. We believe it will grow into the most important market in security over the next decade,” Morgan Gerlach, partner at TCV, said in a statement. “We also believe that the demand for cloud security will move to runtime. Upwind has masterfully timed its product, and Amiram and his team have a lot of work to do.”