Upwind had a buyer at the door. It chose a check instead.
The San Francisco cloud security startup has raised a $400 million Series C round at a $3.8 billion valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, TechCrunch reports. Existing backers including Greylock Partners and Craft Ventures joined, and Globes lists Salesforce Ventures and TCV among other participants, with Canapi Ventures as a new investor.
The round lands nine months after Upwind raised $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.
The Datadog detour
According to a person familiar with the company who spoke to TechCrunch, the round nearly fell apart when Datadog, the publicly traded observability company, tried to buy Upwind. Datadog didn’t offer a premium above the $3.8 billion valuation set by investors, the person said, so Upwind decided to stay independent. Neither company has publicly confirmed the details of the approach, and an Israeli outlet, CTech, had earlier disputed reports of an offer.
Growing fast
Four-year-old Upwind uses AI to secure cloud infrastructure with what it calls “runtime” security, detecting and remediating attacks and vulnerabilities in live services in real time. A source told TechCrunch the company has been adding $20 million to $30 million in annualized recurring revenue each quarter and is projected to end the year at about $90 million in ARR.
That puts its valuation at more than 40 times forecast ARR, TechCrunch notes, high but well below the 80x reportedly fetched by Cyera earlier this year. Founder and CEO Amiram Shachar previously sold Spot.io to NetApp for $450 million.
Upwind continues to draw acquisition interest, according to the same source.
Why it matters
Investors are betting that cybersecurity will be one of the biggest categories of AI-era software spending, and cloud runtime security is a crowded, fast-growing corner of it. Expect Upwind to use this money to push hard into enterprise accounts.
For competing security vendors, that means more noise in the same buyer inboxes. Standing out with CISOs and cloud security leaders now takes precise targeting, sharp messaging and consistent outreach, not just a bigger ad budget.
Sources: TechCrunch, Globes. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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