Upwind, which sells software that protects companies' cloud infrastructure while it is running, announced on 26 January 2026 that it had raised $250m in a Series B round. The round valued the company at $1.5bn, according to SecurityWeek and Globes.
Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital also investing. Existing backers include Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, Craft Ventures, TCV, Alta Park, Cerca Partners, Swish Ventures and Penny Jar Capital, the fund associated with basketball player Stephen Curry.
The new money brings Upwind's total funding to $430m. In a blog post, co-founder and chief executive Amiram Shachar called the round a big day for the company and described Upwind as the first company in modern cloud security to reach a $1bn valuation.
“Cloud infrastructure has changed faster than the security models designed to protect it.”Amiram Shachar, Co-founder and CEO, Upwind
What Upwind does
Upwind sells a cloud-native application protection platform, a category known as CNAPP, that brings together tools for finding misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and threats across cloud workloads. Its approach relies on runtime data, meaning information collected from applications as they run, to show security teams which risks matter most and cut down on alerts.
SecurityWeek reported that the platform gives organisations more visibility into networks, APIs and data flows. Globes reported that Upwind was the first to treat API security and application runtime context as part of a CNAPP.
"Cloud infrastructure has changed faster than the security models designed to protect it," Shachar said in comments reported by SecurityWeek.
Founders and growth
Upwind was founded in 2022 by Shachar with Liran Polak, Tal Zur and Lavi Ferdman, who had previously built the cloud management company Spot.io, which NetApp bought for $450m in 2020, Globes reported. SecurityWeek said the company is headquartered in San Francisco, while JNS described it as Tel Aviv-based.
According to Globes, Upwind said its revenue rose 900% and its customer count grew by 200% over the past year. JNS reported that customers include Siemens, Peloton, Roku and Nubank. SecurityWeek reported that the company had doubled its workforce since its Series A and expanded beyond the US, UK and Israel into Australia, India, Singapore and Japan.
Globes reported that Upwind is the seventh company backed by Cyberstarts to be valued at $1bn or more.
What the money is for
Upwind said it would use the funding to speed up product development and sales, extend its runtime-first platform across data, AI and code, and support more customers. SecurityWeek reported that the company also plans to strengthen the AI security features of the platform and help developers fix misconfigurations before software reaches production.
The company's last round was a $100m Series A in December 2024. Market sources estimated its valuation at the time at $850m to $900m, according to Globes, while JNS put the estimate at $800m to $900m.
Upwind calls the phase that the Series B funds "The Next Wave". Latham & Watkins, which advised Bessemer on the investment, said the company is focused on scaling runtime-first cloud security for enterprises running AI and real-time cloud applications.
Company website: upwind.io