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Cybersecurity continues to attract a lot of attention from organizations looking for better protection from malicious hackers, and venture capitalists want to get in on the action. In the latest example, TechCrunch learned and confirmed this Against the wind — which specializes in valuing and securing cloud infrastructure — is approaching a $100 million round at a valuation of $850 million to $900 million, after the money.
The round includes a mix of new and existing investors such as Craft Ventures, Greylock, CyberStarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi’s Sheva Fund and basketball star Steph Curry’s investment fund Penny Jar. The round is in the final stages of closing – that could come within days – and could include more investors.
The round, a Series B, comes on the heels of the company acquiring “dozens” of Fortune 500 companies and growing its headcount to about 160 people, a source said.
It’s a big jump for Upwind, which previously raised just over $77 million, including $50 million round In September 2023. Upwind’s latest valuation, from that last round, was $300 million. It will use some of the funding for research and development, and some for hiring, with plans to add about 100 people across Israel, San Francisco… and Iceland.
Upwind was founded by Amiram Shashar, who sold his previous company, cloud spend management startup Spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million. It is part of a guard of cybersecurity startups founded in Israel by teams that originally worked in fields such as military intelligence.
In its case, it is also one of many companies in the space focusing on cloud vulnerabilities through a platform approach. Specifically, Upwind aims to address the storm of alerts typically raised by threat detection tools. It claims to reduce these alerts by 90% to focus security operations teams more closely on understanding actual threats and responding to them faster.
The company’s technology covers cloud services (covering areas such as vulnerability management and identity security), workloads (including container security, detection and response) and applications (including areas such as API vulnerability management). To some extent, all of these are interconnected, which is one reason why a platform approach makes sense.
We’ll update this post when we learn more.
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