Upwind Security Inc., a startup with a platform for securing public cloud environments, today announced that it has closed a $250 million funding round.

Bessemer led the Series B investment with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital. The cash infusion comes about a year after Upwind’s previous raise. The company says its revenue increased by more than 900% between the two rounds, though it didn’t provide more specifics.

Upwind detects malicious activity in cloud environments by correlating data from the built-in telemetry services with information collected using eBPF. That technology, which is part of the Linux kernel, turns an instance’s operating system into a monitoring tool. It can provide more granular data on malicious activity than other observability methods.

When Upwind spots a breach, it generates a timeline that explains how the incident started and its scope. The platform also identifies the tactics that the hackers used. Administrators can optionally configure playbooks, or scripts, that enable Upwind to automate some of the tasks involved in remediating a cyberattack.

“Cloud infrastructure has changed faster than the security models designed to protect it,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Amiram Shachar. “The next era of cloud security requires a fundamentally different approach, centered in realtime signals.”

Upwind’s platform detects not only ongoing cyberattacks but also vulnerabilities that might cause a breach in the future. It does so by integrating with a company’s CI/CD system, the collection of automation workflows that it uses to release new code to production. It highlights vulnerable software before developers deploy it.

Upwind detects security flaws in application updates and infrastructure-as-code files, the scripts that companies use to manage cloud environment settings. Additionally, it spots configuration changes that breach regulations. Upwind displays what data assets would be impacted by an insecure update and generates remediation suggestions.

Once a piece of software is in production, the platform maps out how it interacts with a company’s other cloud resources. It also identifies connections to external services. According to Upwind, its platform uses the collected data to identify vulnerabilities such as systems that can be accessed by an unauthorized artificial intelligence agent.

Another set of features focuses on filtering false positives. Upwind identifies vulnerabilities that can’t be exploited by hackers because they’re in a dormant or isolated software component. From there, the platform reduces the number of alerts generated about those issues to prioritize more urgent cybersecurity flaws.

Upwind will use its new funding to expand its feature set. According to the company, one of its priorities will be to add more tools that can help developers detect vulnerabilities before they roll out to production. It also plans to grow its go-to-market and customer service teams.

Photo: Upwind