Upwind Security has not been around for very long. It was only founded at the end of 2022. Yet it could already be up for sale. According to Israeli news sources, Datadog is willing to pay $1 billion for it.
Upwind Security has chosen a rather challenging market to operate in. CNAPP, or Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, are quite popular at the moment. Wiz , for example, was recently acquired by Alphabet (Google) for a whopping $32 billion. Since its inception (and even before that, when it was still in stealth mode), Upwind Security has already raised $180 million in investments.
Is Datadog in the market for Upwind Security?
There are now reports that Datadog is in talks with Upwind Security to acquire the company. According to CTech, it would be willing to pay $1 billion for it.
CTech regularly spreads rumors that we consider to be rather flimsy. For example, yesterday it published a story that Palo Alto Networks was in the market to buy SentinelOne. It cited “industry sources,” a rather vague term. Palo Alto Networks has already told CNBC that there is no such acquisition.
On the other hand, CTech was the first to report Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz, as far as we can tell. So it’s certainly not always wrong. In the case of Upwind Security being bought by Datadog, we are inclined to believe the source. There is no speculation, but it is stated definitively that talks are underway.
Quick exit for Upwind Security founders
Given their previous activities, we also think the founders of Upwind Security are likely to actively seek an exit for their company. They previously sold Spot.io to NetApp for $450 million. It is clear that we are dealing with so-called serial entrepreneurs who want to make a lot of money quickly from a new company. We can safely say that this approach is working quite well, if they manage to sell Upwind too.
Whether this type of quick exit yields the best results for the end customer is, of course, debatable. Customers who had the courage to take a chance on a new player are now confronted with a takeover fairly quickly afterwards. And everyone knows that takeovers always bring change.
Logical acquisition
Anyway, if the takeover does go ahead, it makes sense for Datadog. That company focuses almost exclusively on cloud monitoring and is best known (at least to us) for the Cloud SIEM it offers. So linking up with a CNAPP is a fairly logical move. It allows Datadog to expand its cloud security offering. SIEM and CNAPP are moving closer together across the board, among all providers of cybersecurity solutions. Datadog could achieve this with this acquisition.
Read also: Upwind links API security to cloud security