After several months of speculation about a new funding round, Upwind has finalized the deal. $400 million will be used to strengthen engineering, sales, and marketing, with a new valuation of up to $3.8 billion.
The new valuation is more than double the $1.5 billion valuation from earlier this year. At that time, Upwind raised $250 million in a Series B round, led by Bessemer, as is the case now. Since its founding in 2022, the startup has raised a total of $830 million, according to Bloomberg. Last year, there was talk of a potential acquisition by Datadog for approximately $1 billion.
Runtime-first
Upwind’s platform detects threats in cloud infrastructure. These include malware or suspicious activity, as well as exploitable vulnerabilities. To do so, it uses eBPF sensors that monitor processes, network traffic, and system calls. Since the acquisition of Nyx, these sensors have also been monitoring the execution of application functions.
Earlier this year, Upwind also expanded its platform to mitigate risks related to AI, thereby taking on a more proactive role in the security landscape of cloud environments. With its runtime approach, Upwind differs from competitors such as Wiz and Orca, which traditionally operate agentlessly and scan cloud environments via APIs. These players do share the focus on prioritizing the right threats and avoiding reliance on lists of vulnerabilities to patch; however, that practice is outdated now that many vulnerabilities cannot be exploited and suspicious behavior does not necessarily require exploiting any vulnerabilities at all.
AI lowers the barrier to entry
According to CEO Amiram Shachar, the number of attacks, breaches, and zero-days is rising sharply, creating a need to promote this proactive approach. “In the past three months, there has been more activity than in the past four years combined,” he says. With an AI tool, he argues, the costs and expertise required to hack have dropped to zero. For example, no one needs to be a genius to exploit PHP2Shell: a minimal understanding of the technology is enough to let an agent do the dirty work to compromise a system.