Israeli cloud security company Upwind Security Inc. today launched out of stealth mode and announced that it has raised $50 million in new funding to help enterprises secure their cloud-native infrastructure.

Founded by Amiram Shachar and the founding partners from Spot, a compute management company acquired by NetApp Inc. for $450 million in 2020, Upwind offers software and online tools that are designed to ensure cloud infrastructure and cloud runtime environment security.

Upwind describes itself as a runtime-powered cloud-native application protection platform that leverages runtime data to secure cloud infrastructure. The service mitigates risks that matter, identifies the root causes of threats and responds with context and automation.

The company’s service protects Kubernetes and container-based services with real-time network and operating system-level data using eBPF DeamonSets and Kubernetes audit logs to detect threats within containers. Upwind’s platform offers continuous visibility into how cloud infrastructure and workloads behave in Runtime to find the most critical threats and risks and to prevent them with context and automation.

Upwind also offers application programming interface discovery, posture management and real-time protection. Users can obtain comprehensive visibility into all APIs, sensitive data flows, escalating threats and risk posture.

“In the past year, we worked with hundreds of [chief information security officers] and security engineers to get a mile-deep understanding of their biggest security challenges and priorities,” Chief Executive Shachar said in a blog post. “Through this process, we discovered major hurdles facing security teams and understood that the right, most complete way to solve them is at runtime.”

Greylock Partners L.P., Cyberstarts Venture Capital LP and Leaders Fund LLC led the Series A round, with Penny Jar Capital LLC and former Israeli NBA star Omri Casspi also participating. Including the new funding, Upwind has raised $80 million to date.

Photo: Upwind