Why We Invested In Upwind Security
Craft is thrilled to participate in Upwind Security’s $50M funding round. Upwind has now raised $80M in less than a year, powering their mission to reinvent cloud security with runtime data. We are excited to be joining existing investors Cyberstarts, Greylock, Leaders Fund, Cerca Partners, Sheva VC, and Penny Jar.
Cloud security is a very large addressable market and has seen constant innovation over the years. There have been a number of very high-growth companies built as a result, and Upwind aims to follow in those footsteps with their differentiated cloud security approach that leverages seamless protection at runtime – one of the most pressing challenges in cyber security today. In addition to being excited about the size of the market and Upwind’s unique approach, we firmly believe that Upwind’s founding team, with their track record of success, is one of the most talented in the industry.
As organizations move more and more workloads into the cloud, they are looking for solutions to help keep those workloads protected. Bad actors have been targeting the misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure, which has made this a key priority for CISOs. There are a number of categories that are coming together to make protecting the cloud more seamless, and these categories represent billions in end user spend.
Upwind is coming out of stealth with their next generation cloud security platform that leverages previously unavailable runtime context, which helps companies better secure their cloud workloads. Leveraging a lightweight eBPF agent, Upwind brings real-time visibility to workloads in production. We spoke with a number of CISOs at Upwind’s design partners who unanimously raved about their ability to leverage Upwind to detect and respond to threats faster than existing alternative solutions, and to remove unnecessary false positive alerts. Thanks to this innovative approach, Upwind has the potential to cause a seismic shift in how enterprises are tackling cloud security.
Craft jumped at the opportunity to partner with a repeat founding team that knows what it takes to build a great company and has ridden the wave from zero to exit. The founding team behind Upwind is Amiram Shachar, Lavi Ferdman, Liran Polak, and Tal Zur, the same team that built Spot.io, a cloud cost optimization company, which they grew to a nine-figure business and sold to NetApp for $450M in 2020. After tackling the DevOps world, the founding team saw a unique opportunity to bring their expertise to the cybersecurity field.
Upwind has already made incredible progress just a year since its founding, and we’re excited to be along for the journey. We couldn’t be happier that Upwind is Craft’s first Israeli cybersecurity investment, and we are excited to continue partnering with fantastic founders out of Israel. To echo the company’s motto: Up & Upwind!
Written by Michael Robinson, Kevin Gabura and Bil Harmer.
