Google’s $32 billion purchase of Wiz didn’t just remove a competitor from the cloud security market, it left a gap investors are now racing to fill, and Upwind Security appears to be the biggest beneficiary yet. The startup is closing a $300 million funding round that values it at $3.8 billion, more than double what it was worth just eight months ago.
Bessemer Venture Partners is leading the round, with existing backers joining in. This follows a $250 million raise back in January 2026 that initially put Upwind’s valuation at $1.5 billion, later adjusted to roughly $1.6 billion. Combined with this new round, the San Francisco company has now raised more than $680 million total since its founding.
Amiram Shachar started Upwind in 2022 along with several former Spot.io team members, building a cloud security platform focused on runtime protection, watching infrastructure in real time and flagging which threats actually deserve a security team’s attention rather than burying them in noise. That focus appears to be translating into real revenue growth. Annual recurring revenue sat below $20 million at the end of 2025, and by mid-2026, that number had climbed to somewhere between $50 million and $60 million. The company says it’s targeting $100 million in ARR by year’s end.
Upwind’s customer list already includes Siemens, Peloton, and Roku, a spread that touches industrial technology, consumer hardware, and streaming infrastructure all at once.
The Wiz acquisition explains a lot of what’s happening here. Removing one of the most visible independent cloud security companies from the market left a gap, and a wave of cybersecurity M&A activity through late 2025 and early 2026 reinforced the idea that standalone cloud security firms make attractive acquisition targets. Investors, including Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Stephen Curry’s investment fund, appear to be betting Upwind will become the next company in that category.
Tripling in valuation inside eight months is an aggressive trajectory by almost any standard. Whether Upwind‘s growth can actually keep pace with that number, especially as AI workloads keep expanding the multi-cloud environments it protects, is something only the next few quarters will show.
