Upwind Security, an Israeli cloud-security startup, has expanded its latest financing round to $400 million while holding on to the $3.8 billion valuation it disclosed in September. The updated figures show additional backers joining the round, even as the company's worth has more than doubled since the start of the year.
A Rapid Climb in Valuation
Upwind's valuation trajectory illustrates the pace of investor interest in cybersecurity firms focused on cloud and AI infrastructure. The company was valued between $800 million and $900 million in late 2024, jumped to $1.5 billion in January, and then reached $3.8 billion in September - a figure it has now retained despite the larger funding total. The September round was originally reported at $300 million, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and TCV. The expanded $400 million round adds Canapi Ventures alongside existing investors, including Cyberstarts, Greylock Partners, Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Leaders Fund, Alta Park Capital, Penny Jar Capital, Cerca Partners, Swish Ventures and Picture Capital. The increase follows reports that US software company Datadog had explored acquiring Upwind, though no deal materialized.
How Upwind's Runtime-First Approach Works
Founded in 2022 by Amiram Shachar and former colleagues from Spot.io - a company NetApp acquired for $450 million in 2020 - Upwind builds software that monitors cloud environments as they run. Its "runtime-first" method prioritizes detecting active threats and exploitable vulnerabilities in live systems, rather than depending mainly on static scans, which can surface risks that are not actually exploitable in practice. The platform draws on data from cloud workloads, APIs and client-side agents, giving security, development and DevOps teams a unified view to prioritize which alerts matter most.
Expanding Into AI Security
As companies adopt more AI infrastructure and autonomous software agents, Upwind has moved to address emerging risks in that space. In September, it acquired Israeli startup Aegis in a stock-based deal reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars and launched Upwind AI Labs, a unit dedicated to threats targeting AI systems and AI-driven workflows. "AI is fundamentally transforming cloud infrastructure architecture, the scope of cyber threats, and the very way organizations build and operate software," said Shachar, Upwind's CEO. According to CTech, the company's annual recurring revenue has surpassed $50 million, up from roughly $20 million at the end of 2025.
Why Real-Time Context Matters
Shachar has argued that conventional security tools struggle to keep up with environments that AI agents can alter quickly and unpredictably. "Security must keep pace with environments that AI agents can alter, at a speed and scale that human teams alone cannot match," he said, adding that combining real-time intelligence with contextual analysis helps organizations "shift from alert management to proactive security." The approach reflects a broader industry shift toward tools that assess actual exploitability rather than flagging every theoretical vulnerability, an important distinction for security teams managing limited time and resources.