Upwind Raises $250M to Secure AI Workloads in the Cloud
▼ Summary
– Upwind raised $250 million in Series B funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $430 million.
– The company’s growth strategy, “The Next Wave,” focuses on scaling its runtime-first cloud security platform for AI and real-time enterprise applications.
– Upwind’s approach is based on runtime evidence to reduce security alert noise and prioritize real risk, contrasting with legacy static methods.
– The company has achieved rapid growth, including 900% year-over-year revenue growth and a significant expansion of its global workforce and customer base.
– The funding will accelerate product development in data, AI, and code, and expand go-to-market efforts to support global enterprise adoption.
A significant $250 million Series B investment has propelled Upwind’s total funding to $430 million, marking a pivotal moment for the cloud security innovator. This substantial capital infusion, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with contributions from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital, will accelerate the company’s mission to secure modern, AI-driven cloud workloads. The funding underscores a critical industry shift, as traditional security models struggle to keep pace with the dynamic nature of today’s cloud infrastructure and the unique demands of artificial intelligence applications.
The investment heralds what Upwind terms “The Next Wave,” a strategic growth phase focused on scaling its runtime-first cloud security platform. This approach is designed to empower a new generation of enterprise AI and real-time cloud applications. CEO Amiram Shachar emphasized that legacy security, reliant on periodic snapshots and static data, is fundamentally mismatched for the cloud’s current velocity. “The next era requires a foundation built on real-time signals,” Shachar stated. “That is the only viable method to protect cloud environments in this new AI era. We architected Upwind for where the cloud is heading, not where it’s been.”
The cloud security market continues to expand rapidly, with the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) segment at its core. Analysts project the global CNAPP market will surge to nearly $18.79 billion by 2029. Furthermore, industry predictions suggest that 40% of enterprises implementing zero-trust architectures in the cloud will depend on CNAPP solutions for essential visibility and control by the end of the decade. Upwind has positioned itself as a challenger in this space by rejecting noisy, alert-heavy models in favor of a platform built on live runtime evidence, which helps teams pinpoint genuine, exploitable risks.
Investors are betting on this vision. Elliott Robinson, a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, noted that Upwind’s modern methodology and focus on actionable signal over noise have resonated powerfully with security and engineering teams. “They are building the runtime-first platform for the next generation of enterprises,” Robinson said. Rakesh Loonkar of Picture Capital echoed this sentiment, calling the company’s pace of innovation “relentless” and urging organizations to evaluate their technology.
Upwind’s business metrics reveal explosive traction. Since a $100 million round just one year ago, the company has achieved a staggering 900% year-over-year revenue growth and expanded its customer base by 200%. Its workforce has doubled to over 300 employees, supporting a growing global presence. The platform now secures millions of workloads for major enterprises like Waste Management, Siemens, Carvana, and Wix. These customers report transformative results, including a 98% reduction in security alerts and 60% fewer irrelevant software vulnerabilities, allowing teams to focus resources on actual threats.
Jerich Beason, CISO at Waste Management, highlighted the value of runtime context. “Upwind shows us what is actually happening and why it matters,” Beason said. “Their platform lets us interrogate our own data in real time, saving significant time and money while making our security operations far more effective.”
To support its expansion, Upwind has aggressively grown its partner ecosystem, adding over 100 new partners and forging a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA, while deepening ties with hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure and AWS. The new capital will fuel advancements across three key domains: data, AI, and code. This includes enhancing AI security capabilities within its core platform and extending its runtime-first principles closer to developers to help prevent misconfigurations before they ever reach production.
The broad support from new and existing investors signals strong confidence in Upwind’s direction. Saam Motamedi of Greylock, an early backer, praised the team for setting the category standard through genuine innovation. Gili Raanan of Cyberstarts celebrated building “an important cloud security company” in an innovation-hungry market. Multiple investors, including those from Craft Ventures and Leaders Fund, pointed to the inevitable industry shift away from static security, affirming that Upwind’s architecture is purpose-built for the real-time, AI-powered cloud.
(Source: HelpNet Security)
