This year has been one of market penetration, expansion and innovation for Upwind. From exiting stealth in September 2023 to a little more than a year later, we expanded our global presence with offices in the UK, Iceland, Israel and the US, held a Series A, maintained a robust schedule of product innovation, and had over 100 new customers put their trust in Upwind’s next-generation cloud security platform.
As we approach the end of 2024, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on the year and the growth that we have experienced here at Upwind each month.
January: Visualizing Real-Time Internet paths
In January, we started off the year with continual product advancements, including the ability to visualize real-time Internet exposure paths.
Prioritizing risk has always been one of our top goals. This capability does exactly that – visualizing exposure paths from the Internet for AWS resources, showing customers their entire exposure path through Internet gateways, routing tables, security groups and load balancers.
Throughout the year, we would go on to build out this capability even further, including the External Exposure Dashboard that we went on to release several months later.
February: SSH Session Monitoring
In February, we released further product innovations and announced our release of SSH session monitoring.
Unmonitored SSH sessions can harbor suspicious activity, data exfiltration, and compliance nightmares. Upwind’s release of SSH Session monitoring solved this problem by giving DevOps and Security teams unparalleled visibility into their SSH sessions and actionable insights for improving infrastructure security.
March: API Security & AWS EKS Add-On
In March, we announced two major product advancements – the release of Upwind API Security and the addition of Upwind as an AWS EKS Add-on.
Upwind’s EKS Add-on came as the result of 9 months of working closely with AWS customers and the AWS Service teams, securing Upwind as an AWS Marketplace add-on for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) embedded directly into the AWS Management Console.
With this release, Upwind joined a small number of approved ISVs around the globe, allowing customers to deploy Upwind on Amazon EKS clusters using the same methods you use to deploy native AWS services (automatic discovery & deployment) either manually via the AWS Management Console, AWS APIs or via Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation & Terraform).
Similarly, the release of Upwind API Security enhanced our robust security service by introducing a unified platform designed to address, analyze, and automate API protection. Upwind’s automatic discovery of customers’ API catalogs and testing for the OWASP top 10 API vulnerabilities has helped customers consolidate tools and seamlessly view security findings for both APIs and cloud infrastructure in one centralized location.
April: Best Cloud Runtime Security Solution
In April, Upwind was named the Best Cloud Runtime Security Solution by the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards.
This industry recognition of Upwind’s next-generation cloud security platform would be the first of many that we received in 2024, demonstrating Upwind’s unique value proposition and innovation.
May: Identity Security
In May, we announced the release of Upwind Identity Security, providing Upwind customers with the ability to discover human and machine identities across clouds. This new major capability provides Upwind customers with a deep understanding of who has access to what, provides automated actions to remove stale access, and achieves least privilege access across services.
June: GenAI-based Threat Stories
In June, we announced the release of Upwind’s “Threat Stories” – a GenAI-based capability designed to address the challenge of connecting the dots between seemingly isolated security findings.
Upwind’s Threat Stories transform security investigations by addressing alert fatigue, providing context, and enabling timely responses. By consolidating relevant data points into a clear narrative, Threat Stories allow teams to focus on the bigger picture and prioritize threats more effectively. They detail the sequence of events, including vulnerabilities, detections, and login activity, giving a deeper understanding of the “why” behind an event. This comprehensive view streamlines investigations, allowing for faster and more efficient threat responses.
July: Google Cloud Marketplace
In July, we announced that Google Cloud users could purchase the Upwind Cloud Security Platform directly through Google Cloud Marketplace.
To be listed on Google Cloud Marketplace, qualified vendors must complete a rigorous, exclusive process to be listed as a Google Cloud vendor. Upwind’s acceptance as a qualified vendor through Google Cloud Marketplace demonstrates the deep strategic partnership between Upwind and Google Cloud and our shared commitment to providing comprehensive, agile cloud security.
August: Agentless Cloud Scanners
In August, we announced the release of Upwind Agentless Cloud Scanners, expanding our eBPF sensor-centric approach and giving organizations more flexibility to easily get deep context even in areas where installing sensors can’t simply happen or where it’s very difficult to deploy.
Upwind’s Agentless Cloud Scanners came as a powerful addition to our leading eBPF-based sensor, providing unified, comprehensive coverage for infrastructure and applications, across clouds, platforms and architectures.
September: Orbital View
In September, we announced the release of Upwind Orbital View – an easy, new way to visualize the most important resource information through holistic inventory mapping and dynamic network analysis, helping customers rapidly understand resource behavior and risks.
The Upwind Orbital view gives customers the ability to easily visualize resource context, such as related images, storage, privilege attributes, identity roles with access, internet traffic, security groups, resource communication, compute resources and API endpoints.
October: Industry Recognition & API Sensitive Data Flows
In October, we received a significant amount of industry recognition, including being named to the Fortune 2025 Cyber 60 and The Information’s 50 Most Promising Startups for 2024. CRN also named us as one of the top 10 hottest cybersecurity startups of 2024.
We also announced a significant new addition to our API Security capability – the automatic discovery and classification of sensitive data flows.
With this new capability, Upwind automatically tracks sensitive data routes and classifies sensitive data as PCI, PII, and PHI by analyzing API samples recognized by the Upwind sensor, making it easy to identify where customers are at elevated risk.
November: Windows Cloud Scanning
In November, we announced that Upwind’s cloud scanning capabilities now include support for Windows OS, providing even deeper security coverage for cloud environments.
This extended support is providing even deeper coverage for Upwind customers across their cloud stack.
December: $100 Million Series A
Finally, this month we announced our $100 million Series A, which was featured in dozens of media outlets including Reuters and TechCrunch. The round was led by Craft Ventures and joined by TCV, Alta Park with our existing investors, Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, Cerca and Sheva to accelerate our global expansion and fuel our mission of building the next-generation cloud security powered by runtime.
Not only that – it was also celebrated by the New York Stock Exchange and featured on the Nasdaq tower.
This month, AWS also announced our new EC2 Image Builder integration– making it easier than ever for teams to bake Upwind into their golden images.
“It’s great seeing Upwind continue to excel on the AWS Marketplace, helping their customers to secure containers and now EC2 instances at Runtime on AWS with AWS native support as an EKS add on and now part of the EC2 ImageBuilder.”
– Phillip Potloff I General Manager, AWS Marketplace
And finally, this month we announced Upwind Shift Left – our new capability that allows you to easily identify and prioritize vulnerabilities during build time, reducing risks before software reaches production without creating any noise and unnecessary work for developers. This was also covered by major media including AP news and Business Insider.
Looking to 2025
As we said at the start of this article – this year was a big one for Upwind. We penetrated the crowded CNAPP market and signed over 100 customers, bringing a fresh wave of innovation with our next-generation cloud security platform. Above all, we want to thank our investors and customers who have continued to trust and support us as we innovate, grow and continue our trajectory with the goal of being one of the leading cybersecurity companies.
As we head into the new year, we will leverage our new funding to fuel our global expansion and innovation, doubling our headcount to nearly 300 people in 2025. We will also continue to expand our operations across our current offices in Israel, San Francisco, the UK, and Iceland.
To learn more about Upwind, our roadmap for 2025 and how we are helping customers implement next-generation cloud security – reach out to us or schedule a demo.
