Analysis
Upwind Security raised $300 million in a Series C co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and TCV, valuing the cloud-security startup at $3.8 billion -- roughly triple the $1.5-1.6 billion mark it hit in January, according to Bloomberg. Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Greylock, Cyberstarts, Leaders Fund, and Alta Park Capital also joined, and CTech separately confirmed the round's terms.
Founded in late 2022 by CEO Amiram Shachar with three co-founders from Spot.io, the cloud cost-optimization company they sold to NetApp for $450 million in 2020, Upwind builds runtime cloud-security software that monitors live, operating environments rather than relying on periodic static scans -- the same real-time approach Wiz popularized before Google's $32 billion acquisition of it earlier this year. That deal is the backdrop for Upwind's entire 2026: with Wiz effectively removed as an independent option, rivals including Upwind, SentinelOne's Singularity Cloud Security, Snyk, and incumbents Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud and Check Point's CloudGuard are all racing for the customers and mindshare Wiz leaves behind as it integrates into Google Cloud.
From under $20M to $50-60M ARR in six months
Upwind's own numbers tell the growth story: annual recurring revenue sat below $20 million at the end of 2025 and has since climbed to an estimated $50 million to $60 million, with the company targeting $100 million ARR by year-end.
That trajectory -- roughly tripling revenue in under a year -- is what investors are underwriting at $3.8 billion, a multiple that would look reasonable against $100 million in ARR but stretched against the current run rate. With 550 employees, Upwind has scaled headcount well ahead of the revenue it's currently generating, a bet that customer acquisition matters more than efficiency while the Wiz-shaped gap in the market stays open.
The risk is straightforward: Wiz's absence from the independent market is a temporary tailwind, not a permanent moat. Google will eventually integrate Wiz's technology into Cloud's native security stack, at which point the incumbents Upwind is racing against today become Google Cloud itself -- a much harder competitor to displace than a standalone security vendor. Whether Upwind can convert this year's growth into durable enterprise contracts before that integration completes is the question the new valuation is actually pricing.
