Upwind pursues $300M at $3.8B, seven months after its Series B

Why it matters

Upwind's proposed valuation is roughly 2.5 times its January mark after the company reported 900% revenue growth and a doubled customer base. The pending financing puts pressure on Upwind to convert that growth into revenue capable of supporting a $3.8B price.

Amiram Shachar and fellow repeat founders Tal Zur, Lavi Ferdman and Liran Polak are pursuing $300 million in financing for Upwind Security at a $3.8 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Bessemer Venture Partners is leading the reported investment, with some existing investors participating. Bloomberg described Upwind as actively raising the money, so the transaction should be treated as a financing in progress rather than a completed round.

The pace is the striking part. Upwind announced a $250 million Series B on January 29th, 2026, at a reported $1.5 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch's report on the round. The new financing would give Upwind a valuation roughly 2.5 times higher seven months later. Upwind would have raised $550 million across those two financings alone. The financing would bring Upwind's disclosed funding to about $728 million, assuming the reported round closes.

Upwind raised a $28 million seed round in 2022. It also raised $50 million in 2023 and a $100 million Series A in 2024, bringing its listed funding before the reported financing to $428 million. The round put capital behind four founders who had already spent years building cloud infrastructure together.

A second cloud company from the same four founders

Shachar, Zur, Ferdman and Polak previously built Spot.io, which helped customers automate and reduce cloud-computing costs. NetApp acquired Spot in 2020 for approximately $450 million, according to TechCrunch's report at the time, which attributed the estimate to CTech and noted that NetApp did not confirm the price.

Upwind grew directly from that operating history. The founders had already worked inside cloud infrastructure, where applications, containers and services appear and disappear continuously. They applied that experience to security, arguing that periodic scans leave teams with long lists of theoretical problems and too little information about which vulnerabilities matter in a running production system.

Shachar had started even earlier in infrastructure. He spent six years in the Israeli military's Mamram computing unit, where he led data-center infrastructure, according to Calcalist's 2022 profile of the founders. He studied computer science at the College of Management Academic Studies and began Spot as a final-year project.

That background matters to Upwind's pitch. Shachar and his co-founders are selling security to the DevOps and engineering organizations they previously built tools for, approaching cloud workloads through their experience operating infrastructure.

The runtime thesis gets an AI wrapper

Upwind combines agentless cloud scanning with runtime sensors, including eBPF-based monitoring. The sensors observe live workload behavior such as processes and network activity. Upwind then correlates those signals with identities, configurations, APIs, data and code changes to show whether a vulnerability is running, reachable or connected to an active attack path.

The approach is designed to reduce the alert backlogs produced by static vulnerability scans. Upwind's website claims 93% noise reduction and detection within 15 seconds. Those are Upwind's own performance figures, and the public materials do not provide a standardized independent comparison across competing products.

Bessemer outlined the investment case when it led the January Series B. The firm argued that Upwind's sensors and correlation engine can reconstruct an execution graph of a customer's cloud environment, giving security teams context about which weaknesses can actually be exploited.

Upwind has since extended that architecture into AI security. A May product announcement described coverage for models, prompts, data flows, agents, connected tools and Model Context Protocol servers. The product is meant to follow an AI application's behavior through the cloud services and permissions it can reach.

Shachar summarized the technical bet in a separate post on agentic cloud security: "The agent is only as good as the substrate." Upwind wants its runtime data to become that substrate, giving automated security agents current information before they investigate or change a production environment.

AI gives Upwind a larger sales story, while the underlying wager remains cloud telemetry. The usefulness of its agents will depend on the quality, coverage and freshness of the data collected beneath them.

The valuation is moving faster than the disclosed scale

Upwind's public materials list customers including Roku, Siemens, Nubank, Wix, Peloton and Nextdoor.

In January, Upwind reported 900% year-over-year revenue growth and a doubled customer base, according to TechCrunch's coverage of the Series B. The available materials do not disclose Upwind's current revenue, customer count or headcount.

That makes the $3.8 billion valuation primarily a bet on future scale. The reported price is 153% above the January valuation, a step-up that would usually require rapid operating progress, unusually favorable financing terms or investors' willingness to pay ahead of the available metrics. Bloomberg's report does not establish whether $3.8 billion is a post-money figure or describe liquidation preferences and other terms that can change the economics behind a headline valuation.

Cybersecurity investors have a new price anchor

Google completed its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, a cloud-security company, on March 11th, 2026, according to Alphabet's SEC disclosure.

That transaction removed the largest independent cloud-security specialist and established an unusually high reference point for private investors. Upwind competes with products from Wiz, Orca Security, Sysdig, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, along with younger runtime-focused vendors. Bessemer's willingness to lead another reported financing so soon after January suggests it sees room for an independent platform built around live workload behavior.

If completed, the new financing would give Shachar and his co-founders enough capital to expand product coverage and enterprise distribution without returning to the market quickly. It would also raise the execution threshold. Upwind must turn a respected founding team, a timely AI-security message and its roster of large customers into revenue that can support a $3.8 billion price.

The four founders have already built and sold one cloud-infrastructure company together. Investors are paying heavily for the possibility that their second act becomes much larger.