In the summer of 2015, Amiram Shachar made a call to former colleague and close friend Liran Polak to pitch an idea for a startup. Shachar had no product, no market, and no funding — just a raw concept and a bond forged in the military’s elite cloud computing unit.
Polak didn’t blink. By the end of the day, he had resigned from his job as a DevOps engineer at a large financial institution and signed onto Shachar’s vision. So did another former colleague, Lavi Ferdman, who walked away from a sales engineering job at IBM. “We trust each other completely,” Shachar says. “It’s not just about skills. It’s about faith in each other’s judgment. If they had called me with a startup idea, I’d have left my job too.”
That chemistry laid the foundation for Spot.io, a startup that tapped into unused cloud server space to help companies save money on their computing infrastructure. Just five years later, it sold for $450 million. But for Shachar and his team, Spot.io was only the beginning.
Their next venture, Upwind, aims to transform how companies secure their cloud infrastructures. In a crowded market dominated by billion-dollar giants, Upwind is pioneering a new approach. By continuously monitoring and analyzing a company’s entire cloud infrastructure as its applications are actively running (in so-called runtime), Upwind prioritizes critical security issues that can cause software to stop working or result in a hack. Although the 2-year-old startup regularly squares off against industry heavyweights, Shachar is unfazed. Recently named among The Information’s 50 Most Promising Startups for 2024, Upwind counts Wix, Bill.com, Ping Identity, Booking.com, and Abnormal Security among its customers.
“Our secret weapon is our team,” Shachar says. “When you’ve established the kind of trust we have, you can create something truly special.”
Building on Mamram’s foundations
Like most Israelis, Shachar joined the military for mandatory service at age 18. He, along with Ferdman and Polak, were among the top 1% selected to join Mamram, the prestigious Center of Computing and Information Systems in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Mamram is tasked with creating the technological backbone for the entire Israeli military, supporting everything from missile defense systems, such as the Iron Dome, to enterprise resource planning, recruitment, and human resources systems.
For the next five years, Shachar, Ferdman, and Polak worked closely together. They did six months of intensive, 16-hour-day training on software development, system architecture, and other advanced technical skills, then deployed into real-world scenarios, building and maintaining critical military applications. Often thought of as Israel’s tech innovation hub, Mamram has produced a long list of successful alumni who have gone on to found notable companies such as CyberArk, Taboola, and Matrix.
Shachar eventually became an officer and team leader in the Linux unit. During his service, he studied computer science on nights and weekends at the College of Management Academic Studies, Israel’s largest college. In 2012, he left the IDF to take a job as the director of development operations at Ybrant Digital, an Indian digital marketing agency with an office in Tel Aviv. While leading a team that built and maintained the company’s tech infrastructure, Shachar noticed a growing issue. Ybrant Digital’s migration of its marketing services applications to the cloud was incurring higher hosting costs than the company expected.
At the time, the most affordable cloud infrastructure options were “spot” instances — unused server capacity offered at discounted rates by cloud providers. Yet these instances came with a significant drawback: Their availability could change unpredictably if the host needed to give capacity to someone else, and they didn’t come with longer-term contracts. He began envisioning software that could help companies dynamically and reliably move their workloads across cloud servers to optimize cost and availability. The idea became the foundation for Spot.io.
A Cinderella story
Post-acquisition, working in NetApp’s corporate environment was a new experience for Shachar. He and his co-founders quickly found themselves on the receiving end of numerous requests from NetApp’s security team, whose scanning tools flagged thousands of potential vulnerabilities, bugs, and misconfigurations in Spot’s software — issues that Shachar’s team was expected to address.
“At first, we thought, ‘If we tackle all of this, we won’t have time to build a single new feature for the next year,’” Shachar says. But as his engineers dove into the flagged issues, they discovered that many weren’t as critical as initially thought. The problem was a disconnect between the security team identifying the issues and the engineering team tasked with resolving them. “We weren’t speaking the same language,” Shachar says.
The broader industry shift from static, on-premises servers to dynamic, distributed cloud-based infrastructure was also making security more complex. “We realized security tools couldn’t just be for security teams, because everyone in the organization interacts with cloud applications,” Shachar says.
Sensing an opportunity, the Spot co-founders, along with Tal Zur, an early engineering hire, decided to launch Upwind — named after Shachar’s love of wing foiling, a water sport that combines elements of windsurfing, hydrofoiling, and kitesurfing. “When you surf upwind, you’re charting a strategic course directly into the wind,” he says. “In cybersecurity, you need to harness the power of adversaries and use it against them.” The metaphor also applies to Upwind’s mission of taking on much larger competitors in the cybersecurity market.
Upwind’s key advantage, Shachar says, stems from approaching security with a development and operations mindset. “If you have 33,000 misconfigurations, we’ll find the five that genuinely threaten your business,” he says. Upwind also equips developers and platform engineers with root-cause analyses of security issues, providing clear insights into what happened, when and where it occurred in the code, and how to fix it. Unlike traditional tools, Upwind’s platform was also developed specifically for securing cloud infrastructure.
This time around, investors quickly embraced the idea. Since its founding in September 2022, the company has raised a total of $180 million in funding, which includes a recently announced $100 million Series A.
“It’s been impressive to see how much Upwind has accomplished in such a short amount of time,” reflects Saam Motamedi, a partner at Greylock and board member at Upwind. “This is a testament to the co-founders’ ability to quickly build and iterate on their platform and recruit a world-class team.”
A familial culture
Over the years, the loyalty among Shachar and his founding team has rubbed off. After the NetApp acquisition, most Spot employees transitioned along with the founders into the larger company. When Shachar, Ferdman, Polak, and Zur started Upwind, nearly all of those 60 Spot employees joined them.
Now with a team of 120 and growing, Upwind has implemented systems to cultivate the trust and camaraderie that have been at the core of its success. While integrating new hires into such a tightly bonded group can be challenging, Shachar views it as a strength. “When we interview people, we tell them we want them to come work with us for the next decade or two, to join this family,” he says. “We love creating these types of relationships. People really buy into that.”
To ensure that new hires align with the culture, candidates are evaluated on core principles: being customer-driven, acting quickly, improving daily, taking ownership, showing resourcefulness and resilience, and leading with humility. Existing employees are also regularly reviewed on how well they follow these standards.
“Culture is what people do when you’re not in the room,” says Shachar. “Do they argue, yell at each other, play politics? Hiring for values means that I’m confident my VP of product or engineering will make the same decision I would make 95 percent of the time because they value what I do. That’s our special sauce.”
