Upwind, an Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup, raises $100 million at a valuation of $850-900 million, sources say

Cybersecurity continues to be of great interest to enterprises on the lookout for higher protection against malicious hackers, and VCs wish to be a part of it. In a recent example, TechCrunch learned and confirmed this Against the wind — a specialist in assessing and securing cloud infrastructure — is closing in on a $100 million round at a post-money valuation of $850-900 million.

New and existing investors participating within the round include Craft Ventures, Greylock, CyberStarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi’s Sheva Fund and basketball star Steph Curry’s Penny Jar investment fund. The round is in the ultimate closing phase – this might occur inside a few days – and will include additional investors.

The round, a Series B, comes hot on the heels of the corporate acquiring “dozens” of Fortune 500 corporations and growing its workforce to about 160 people, the source said.

This is a significant step for Upwind, which previously raised just over $77 million, including: $50 million round in September 2023. Upwind’s latest round valuation was $300 million. It will spend part of the funds on research and development, and part on employment, and plans to employ about 100 people in Israel, San Francisco… and Iceland.

Upwind was founded by Amiram Shachar, who sold his previous company, cloud expense management startup Spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million. It is an element of a guard of cybersecurity startups founded in Israel by teams that cut their teeth originally working in areas corresponding to military intelligence.

In this case, it’s also one of many corporations within the industry specializing in cloud vulnerabilities through a platform approach. Specifically, Upwind goals to take care of the flood of alerts which are typically generated by threat detection tools. It claims to cut back the number of these alerts by 90% to focus security operations teams more on understanding real threats and responding to them faster.

The company’s technology includes cloud services (including areas corresponding to vulnerability management and identity security), workloads (including container security and detection and response), and applications (including areas corresponding to API vulnerability management). To some extent, all of these issues are interconnected, which is one of the the explanation why a platform approach is smart.

We will update this post as we learn more.