Upwind Raises $250M

From the outside, Upwind Security looks like it’s had a smooth journey so far. Just four years in, the cloud security startup is now worth $1.5 billion and boasts the likes of Siemens, Peloton, Roku, Wix, Nextdoor, and Nubank among its clientele. But if you ask the company’s co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar, the journey to get here was anything but certain. Upwind likes to call that approach “runtime” security: Prioritizing alerts and remediation efforts around threats and vulnerabilities in active services in real time. As Shachar puts it, it’s an “inside-out” take on cloud security, where internal signals like network requests and API traffic function as context to help security teams separate urgent risks from those that can wait. Developing that approach wasn’t easy, however, as Shachar and his co-founders didn’t have a traditional background in security: They first built and sold a cloud compute brokerage called Spot.io to NetApp for around $450 million in 2020.