Upwind Security just closed a massive $250 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, cementing its place among cloud security's fastest-rising startups. Led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital, the round comes just over a year after the company's $100 million Series A and follows 900% year-over-year revenue growth. The four-year-old startup is betting big on what it calls 'runtime' security - an inside-out approach that monitors active cloud services in real time rather than scanning from the outside.
Upwind Security is having a moment. The cloud security startup just banked $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, barely four years after its founding. But CEO and co-founder Amiram Shachar isn't celebrating the way you'd expect. Instead, he's candid about how uncertain the journey's been.
"Three years ago, we would spend hours asking ourselves if we were heading in the right direction, and 80% of the time, it felt like we weren't," Shachar told TechCrunch in an interview following the Series B announcement. "At the beginning, we constantly questioned whether the market needed our solution, whether it would be too hard to integrate into larger systems, or if customers would adopt it."
The $250 million round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital. It's a significant vote of confidence in Upwind's approach to cloud security - what the company calls "runtime" security. The concept is straightforward but represents a fundamental shift: instead of scanning cloud environments from the outside, Upwind monitors what's actually happening inside active services in real time.
