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In November, TechCrunch broke news about how to start a cybersecurity startup Against the wind He was getting a lot of internal attention for raising money at a big valuation. Now, we can confirm that the deal has been completed: Upwind has closed a $100 million Series A round. The company confirmed that the round is valued at $900 million after money.
Craft Ventures, the investment firm created by David Sachs, is leading the deal, with participation from TCV, Alta Park Capital and all previous backers of Upwind. Previous investors include Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi’s Sheva Fund and basketball star Stephen Curry’s investment fund Beanie Jar. The company has now raised $180 million, and this latest valuation triples the price it earned through the seed round.
Upwind, based in New York, plans to use the funding to grow its team – it currently has about 150 employees and plans to double that across the Bay Area, Iceland, the UK and Israel, with a focus on sales and marketing.
The company will also continue to develop its platform, which focuses on “runtime” security: prioritizing alerts and remediation efforts about threats and vulnerabilities in active services in real time.
Organizations are often bombarded with alerts across their networks, and Upwind claims it can reduce these alerts by 90% to focus only on the most important ones. Her focus currently covers the areas of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), Application Programming Interface (API) security, vulnerability management, identity security, and container security.
Upwind’s $900 million Series A now underscores the interest cloud security is now receiving from investors – which in turn is due to the interest cloud security is receiving from enterprise developers and CISOs.
In short, cloud computing has become an indispensable tool for organizations that want to scale up or down quickly or adopt (or drop) services quickly. But the growth of the cloud computing market has proven to be a minefield for security teams.
Attack “surfaces”—the perimeter of an organization’s systems, which can include devices, applications, networks, infrastructure, and connectivity with partners, among others—are growing and becoming more complex. As more components are added and removed or updates are made, unintended vulnerabilities are created.
Malicious hackers are ready to take advantage of all of this, so it’s up to cloud security companies to figure out how to stay one step ahead of them to keep people and businesses safe.
Upwind is one of an army of cloud security startups and larger, more established companies that are building the tools to make this happen. Others in the same space include the likes of Wiz, Orca, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, and more.
Upwind’s optimism in the market is also partly due to the broader business climate, with a number of the most successful companies seeing huge gains in terms of investment and business. Wiz — which claims to be one of the fastest-growing startups ever (it’s only five years old and says it’s on track to reach $1 billion in ARR by next year) rejected a $23 billion offer from Google because it believes it could be bigger. On their own.
Amiram Shashar, founder and CEO of Upwind, believes the company’s focus on uptime alerts gives it a unique place among its competitors. In fact, the focus on alerts alone is quickly becoming a commodity: just last week, Wiz acquired Dazz to boost its alert hit rate. But it looks like this will also be expanded to include more predictive alerts. In an interview, he said some of the investments will go toward “catching up on some of the basics of cloud security.”
“By the end of this year, and then next year, we will move towards AI security and advanced prevention, getting into the code and dependencies in the code, to achieve higher accuracy (of the platform),” he said. “This is where we’re going.”
Given the rate and extent of cyber breaches, investors are also confident that there will be room for more companies and more innovation in the coming years.
“Cloud security is still in its infancy. Over the next decade, we believe it will grow to become the most important market in security,” Morgan Gerlak, partner at TCV, said in a statement. “We also believe demand for cloud security will shift to uptime. Upwind has expertly timed their product, and Amiram and his team have a lot to play for.
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