Israeli cybersecurity company Upwind Security Inc. is reportedly close to raising $100 million in new funding to enhance its cloud security platform and expand its market presence.

According to TechCrunch, the round is being raised on a valuation of $850 million to $900 million. The company was founded by Amiram Shachar and the founding partners from Spot, a compute management company acquired by NetApp Inc. for $450 million in 2020.

Upwind, which launched publicly with a $50 million round in September 2023, offers software and online tools that are designed to ensure cloud infrastructure and cloud runtime environment security. Its cloud-native application protection platform leverages runtime data to secure cloud infrastructure and mitigate critical risks, pinpoint root causes of threats and automate responses with contextual precision.

The platform protects Kubernetes and container-based services using eBPF DaemonSets and Kubernetes audit logs, tools that enable the detection of threats at the operating system and network levels in real time to ensure that containerized environments remain secure. Continuous visibility into workloads provides insights into infrastructure behavior during runtime.

Upwind offers a suite of features, including application programming interface discovery and real-time protection, which allow organizations to gain deep visibility into all APIs, sensitive data flows and potential vulnerabilities. The platform’s posture management tools help users assess and improve their overall cloud security posture.

One of the core strengths of Upwind’s offering is its ability to combine runtime data with build-time insights. The integration helps streamline security processes for development, security and operations teams, providing a unified approach to cloud protection and delivering enhanced efficiency in managing threats across different stages of the application lifecycle.

Through the provision of continuous and automated protection, Upwind claims, it can ensure that organizations can stay ahead of emerging threats.

“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 after raising funding last year. “Through this process, we discovered major hurdles facing security teams and understood that the right, most complete way to solve them is at runtime.”

Though the round hasn’t closed, investors reportedly include Craft Ventures LP, Greylock, CyberStarts Ltd., Leaders Fund Capital, Sheva VC Fund Ltd. and Penny Jar Capital.

Photo: Upwind