In November, TechCrunch broke the news that cybersecurity startup Upwind was getting a lot of internal interest for raising money with a big valuation. Now, we can confirm that the deal has been completed: Upwind has closed a $100 million Series A round. The round is valued at $900 million after the 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.
New York-based Upwind plans to use the funding to grow its team, where 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. It currently covers 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.
The fact that Upwind is now valued at $900 million in a Series A round underscores the interest cloud security is now getting from investors – which in turn is due to the attention cloud security is getting from enterprise developers and CISOs.
In short, cloud computing has become an indispensable tool for organizations that want to quickly scale up or down, 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—are growing and becoming more complex. As more components are added, removed, or updated, you gain more unintended vulnerabilities.
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 ahead of the curve and keep people and businesses safe.
Upwind is one of an army of startups and larger, more established companies building tools to make this happen. Other companies in the same space include Wiz, Orca, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, and more.
The optimism surrounding Upwind is also partly due to the broader business climate, with a number of the most successful startups 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), turned down a $23 billion offer from Google because it believed it could be bigger. On his 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 rate.
But it looks like Upwind will also expand its focus into more predictive alerts. In an interview, Shashar said some of the investment will be directed 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 data breaches, investors are also confident that there will be room for more companies and 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.
