Cybersecurity continues to receive significant attention from businesses seeking better protection from malicious hackers, and venture capital firms want to join in the effort. In the latest example, cloud infrastructure valuation and security specialist Upwind is approaching a $100 million round at a post-money valuation between $850 million and $900 million, TechCrunch reported. has learned and confirmed.
The round includes a mix of new and existing investors, including Craft Ventures, Greylock, CyberStarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi's Sheva Fund, and basketball star Steph Curry's investment fund Penny Jar. There is. This round is in the final stages of completion and could close within the next few days, with the possibility of more investors participating.
The Series B round comes on the heels of the company acquiring “dozens” of Fortune 500 companies and growing its workforce to about 160 people, the people said.
This is a big jump for Upwind, which had previously raised just over $77 million, including a $50 million round in September 2023. Upwind's last valuation from its latest round was $300 million. The company plans to hire about 100 people in Israel, San Francisco and Iceland, with some of the funding going to research and development and some to hiring.
Upwind was founded by Amiram Shachar, who sold his previous company, cloud spend management startup Spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million. This is part of the security startup's security, which was founded in Israel by a talented team originally working in fields such as military intelligence.
In its case, it is also one of many companies in the space focused on cloud vulnerabilities through a platform approach. Specifically, Upwind aims to address the barrage of alerts typically generated by threat detection tools. It claims to reduce these alerts by 90%, allowing security operations teams to focus on understanding real threats and responding quickly.
The company's technology covers cloud services (covering areas such as vulnerability management and identity security), workloads (including container security, detection and response), and apps (including areas such as API vulnerability management). Masu. To some extent, these are all interconnected, which is one reason why a platform approach makes sense.
We will update this post as soon as we know more.