Customers have always been our north-star. Being “Driven By Customers” is not just a paragraph written on our Careers page – it’s the way we operate on a daily basis. It is how we hire, promote, and give each other feedback. It is also how we build products, prioritize features, and think about our roadmap.
When Upwind was first started 18 months ago, we spoke with numerous security leaders. The feedback we received and the pain points we found were very consistent.
- Lack of prioritization — “We have more critical security findings than we can handle.”
- Wasted time — “Other teams (Developers, DevOps & Platform Engineers) can’t trust the data we export from our security tools.”
- Evolving threats — “EDR/Anti-Virus approaches don’t defend cloud workloads properly, and Static approaches to cloud security don’t provide real-time protection”
However, at the same time, we listened carefully to the lack of desire to install agents. We received consistent feedback that agents are unnecessary, and even if security teams wanted to install them, they couldn’t without help from other teams.
To solve the above pressing challenges, we had to rethink the way teams are approaching the problem. We had to “reshape” it, and come up with something simple yet comprehensive, that can bridge gaps across teams – from development to applications to devops and even SREs. We knew we needed to include infrastructure and application context at the same time, something that can justify the investment and effort of a deployment. To do that, our leading principles were:
- Platform approach — a comprehensive CNAPP, with aggregate cloud security capabilities like secret and vulnerability scanning, risk prioritization, identity security, and monitoring for configurations and external exposures.
- High fidelity application context — runtime data can be used for more than just “detection and response. It can be better used for identities, vulnerabilities, external exposures, and configuration risk prioritization.
Thanks to our amazing customers — I am excited to announce that we have raised an additional $100 million in a Series A round led by Craft and joined by TCV, Alta Park with our amazing 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.
“Upwind is completely disrupting the cloud security ecosystem and building a platform capability that doesn’t exist in the market today, all just natively.”
– Rinki Sethi I VP & CISO, Bill
The dream is the journey
It has been a wild, exciting ride since starting the Upwind journey in early 2023. To date, we have raised $180 million in total in funding – but to us, the real recognition is what our customers and the industry have to say about us.
“Upwind has taken our cloud security to the next level. The deep build time and runtime context has helped us prioritize issues that are truly critical to our organization and resulted in 4x faster time to remediation.”
– Gadi Rapaport I Global IT Director
“Upwind has revolutionized our approach to managing our hybrid cloud infrastructure, providing comprehensive coverage and visibility. With its realtime capabilities, we can closely monitor all processes and activities in our Kubernetes environments. We successfully deployed it across over dozens of clusters in 4 data centers without any issues or impact on performance. It’s been a game-changer for our security and operations.”
-Guy Fridman I Director of Cybersecurity, Agoda
In the past few weeks, we were named to the Fortune 2025 Cyber 60 and The Information’s 50 Most Promising Startups for 2024. CRN has named us as one of the top 10 hottest cybersecurity startups of 2024, and analysts list us as a top CNAPP vendor.
“Using Upwind has completely changed the way we protect our AKS clusters. Upwind’s real-time container security has cut 98% of our alert noise, making it easy for us to quickly find and fix risks, stop threats and ensure that our containerized environment is secure.”
-Kalim Aziz I Cyber Security Leader, Petrofac
“Upwind’s focus on runtime security enables us to prioritize the development of our own platform. Our experience with the Upwind founding team has us excited to see how the product grows over the coming years.”
-Matt Wise I Principal Engineer at Nextdoor
Even more importantly, our customers tell us that to them, Upwind isn’t just another tool – it’s a key driver of security and collaborative DevSecOps.
+ $100,000,000
This new funding will fuel Upwind’s global expansion and innovation and will help us double our headcount to nearly 300 people in 2025, as well as expand our operations across our current offices in Israel, San Francisco, the UK, and Iceland.
We feel humbled and honored to be backed by such incredible investors, who have supported us on every step of this journey. We know that together, we truly are powering the future of cloud security.
“We believe Upwind is building a generational cyber security company. The cloud security market is one of the most valuable and rapidly growing sectors within cyber. It’s experiencing a tectonic shift as organizations are maturing from agentless approaches towards Upwind’s platform which brings vital runtime context and real-time protection. Since our initial investment in Upwind 15 months ago, we’ve witnessed the market fully embrace their next generation cloud security platform, which has all the capabilities buyers have come to expect from their CNAPP vendor but all powered by a single eBPF agent at the core.”
-Michael Robinson I Partner and Head of Growth at Craft Ventures
“Cloud security is still in the early innings. Over the next decade, we believe it will grow into the most consequential market in security. We also believe demand in cloud security will shift to runtime. Upwind has timed its product expertly, and Amiram and his team have a whole lot to play for.”
-Morgan Gerlak I Partner at TCV
Bringing runtime to cloud security one feature at a time.
Thank you for supporting us and joining us on this journey to build the next-generation cloud security platform. Your feedback, suggestions and trust in us as our customers fuels everything we do at Upwind. We look forward to continuing to innovating and building a more secure future, together.
Up & Up!
Amiram.
