Cloud security teams have spent years building inventories of assets, scanning infrastructure for vulnerabilities, and collecting alerts from increasingly complex environments. Yet identifying a potential weakness does not always reveal whether it can be exploited, what systems it affects, or how urgently it needs to be addressed. That gap between discovering a risk and understanding its real-world significance is becoming a central challenge for security teams.
Upwind Security is building its platform around that problem. The cloud and AI security company has closed a $400 million Series C round at a $3.8 billion valuation, with Bessemer Venture Partners leading the investment. Canapi Ventures and a group of existing investors also participated. The company said its revenue quadrupled in 2026, while its valuation has climbed from $1.5 billion at its Series B in January.
Why Cloud Security Needs More Context
Modern cloud environments change continuously. Developers deploy new services, workloads communicate with external systems, and applications depend on layers of infrastructure that can span multiple cloud providers. As organizations introduce AI capabilities, those environments can become even more dynamic, with agents and automated processes interacting with resources at a growing pace.
A vulnerability scanner can identify a weakness, but security teams still need to establish whether the affected component is running, whether it is reachable, and how it connects to other parts of the environment. Without that context, teams risk spending time investigating findings that pose limited practical danger while more consequential exposures remain unresolved.
Upwind combines runtime intelligence with information about cloud workloads, APIs, and AI agents to help security, development, and DevOps teams understand risks in context. The goal is to help organizations prioritize exposures according to their significance and detect attacks as they happen, rather than treating every finding as an isolated problem.
“AI is fundamentally changing both the cloud infrastructure architecture and the scale of cyber threats and how organizations build and operate software,” said Amiram Shachar, CEO and Co-Founder of Upwind. “Context is key to managing internal and external risks, security teams need to understand how cloud, and AI interact in real time. We built Upwind to unify those signals and eliminate complexity, helping organizations identify their most critical exposures, fix risks proactively, and detect attacks as they happen.”
From Asset Discovery to Risk Prioritization
The distinction between identifying a vulnerability and understanding its operational significance matters as security teams contend with growing volumes of findings. A long list of alerts can make it difficult to determine which issues warrant immediate attention, particularly when security teams must coordinate with developers and infrastructure owners to implement fixes.
Runtime intelligence offers another layer of information by connecting security findings to activity in live environments. That visibility can help teams make more informed decisions about which risks to investigate and which remediation efforts deserve priority.
Upwind supports deployments across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Its AWS Security Hub integration also makes the platform available through the AWS console, with simplified onboarding and unified billing.
The company’s approach is aimed at making security information useful across organizational boundaries. Developers can use risk context to understand what needs fixing, while security teams can focus their attention on exposures with greater potential consequences.
Funding a Broader Platform
Upwind’s customer base includes Siemens, Roku, Carvana, Nubank, Supabase, and ClickUp. The company’s funding announcement also points to continued investment in product development and go-to-market expansion as it seeks to serve organizations operating increasingly complicated cloud environments.
The round included Canapi Ventures alongside existing backers such as Cyberstarts, Greylock Partners, Craft Ventures, Leaders Fund, Salesforce Ventures, TCV, Alta Park Capital, Penny Jar Capital, Cerca Partners, Swish Ventures, and Picture Capital.
Shachar said the investment would support the company’s next phase of growth. “Our investors have backed our vision and the traction we’re seeing in the market,” Shachar said. “This round gives us the opportunity to accelerate our momentum, expand our capabilities, and continue delivering the innovation customers need to secure cloud and AI infrastructure in the agentic era.”
The Next Test for Cloud Security
The larger question for cloud security vendors is how effectively they can help customers turn technical findings into decisions that reduce risk. As infrastructure expands and software changes more frequently, visibility alone may not be sufficient unless it helps teams understand relationships between assets, identify meaningful exposures, and act on them.
Upwind’s $400 million Series C gives it additional resources to pursue that approach. Its ability to translate runtime context into measurable improvements in detection and remediation will be an important test as enterprises continue to expand their use of cloud services and AI.
