As enterprises continue their cloud migration journeys, securing their cloud infrastructure is of paramount importance. As such, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen significant focus on and evolution in the cloud security landscape over the last several years. Despite the activity, most of the focus has been on “shifting left” and enabling organizations to better use security controls, configurations, etc. While this helps companies improve their posture, it fundamentally doesn’t address the biggest challenge in cloud security – what’s happening at runtime. There’s a significant opportunity for a new platform to be built that enables enterprises to holistically secure their cloud infrastructure at runtime.
Today, we’re delighted to announce our partnership with and investment in Upwind, a new cloud security company focused on enabling enterprises to secure their cloud infrastructure at runtime. Greylock co-led the seed round in Upwind with our friends at CyberStarts and Leaders Fund. We are proud to strengthen our support of the company in their latest round of funding, which brings them to a total of $80M raised in less than 12 months since company founding, to equip them to build the leading runtime-powered cloud security platform.
Consolidated Runtime Cloud Security Platform
Upwind’s platform leverages runtime data to provide critical context to strengthen cloud security programs. Leveraging previously unavailable runtime data, including eBPF and cloud infrastructure API based instrumentation techniques, Upwind enables security and infrastructure teams to fill the gaps between development and production by giving the most accurate, real-time view of what’s happening in their cloud environments. Leveraging this runtime approach enables Upwind to reduce unnecessary alerts by a factor of 10 and get to the root causes of risks and remediate threats much faster – resulting in stronger security and more productive security and development teams.
In a period when security leaders are looking to consolidate tools and are demanding more value from their solutions, Upwind is delivering a centralized, efficient cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that can be a holistic solution for an enterprise’s cloud security needs. Out of the box, Upwind provides a comprehensive set of use cases to power an enterprise’s cloud security with a single platform – including vulnerability management, cloud threat detection and response, container security and cloud workload protection program, and more.
Distinguished Repeat Founder Team
The Upwind founding team is a distinguished team of highly successful repeat cloud entrepreneurs. Led by Amiram Shachar (CEO), Liran Polak (Chief Architect), Lavi Ferdman (CRO), and Tal Zur (CTO), the Upwind team previously founded and built Spot.io, a cloud infrastructure optimization company that is used by thousands of companies to optimize infrastructure spend and was acquired by NetApp for $450M, where it continued scaling into a significant nine figure business. With the recognition of the market opportunity in reinventing the cloud security market with an infrastructure and DevOps focus, the team decided to join forces again to found Upwind.
After spending time with hundreds of CISOs and security engineers to understand their biggest security challenges, Upwind emerges from stealth today with an outstanding team and runtime-powered cloud native application protection platform. Upwind is currently deployed and live at many enterprise customers across industries and scaling quickly.
Greylock has a distinguished track record in cybersecurity. Prior and current investments include Palo Alto Networks, Okta, Sumo Logic, Imperva, Skyhigh, Demisto, Sqreen and Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Censys, Cribl, Obsidian, Opal, and Rubrik. We continue to be very active with Israeli startups, including writing the first investor check at company founding (Seed or Series A). Our current Israeli cybersecurity company portfolio includes Apiiro, Cato Networks, Dazz, Kodem, and now, Upwind.
We’re thrilled to partner with Upwind as they reinvent cloud-security with their runtime-powered platform.
