The round. Upwind raised a $400M Series C at a $3.8B post-money valuation. Bessemer Venture Partners led it, as it did the Series B. Every existing investor put in again: Greylock, Cyberstarts, Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, TCV, Alta Park, Picture Capital, Swish Ventures, Cerca Partners, Penny Jar and Leaders Fund. Canapi Ventures is the one new name. Reports in September put the round at $300M with a $3.8B price, so another $100M came in at the same valuation before it closed.
The step-up. In January, Upwind raised a $250M Series B at $1.5B. Nine months later it's worth $3.8B, about 2.5 times as much. Calcalist reports it was valued at $800M to $900M in late 2024. Upwind says total funding is now over $800M, and SiliconANGLE puts it at about $830M.
Why investors paid this price. Upwind says its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has quadrupled since January. It hasn't published an exact ARR figure. Calcalist has reported ARR above $50M, up from about $20M at the end of 2025, and Globes estimates $80M or more for 2026. Even at $80M, $3.8B is close to 50 times ARR. That's a price for growth, not for current revenue. Globes also reports that Datadog offered about $4B to buy Upwind in recent months and the founders said no, betting the company will be worth more on its own. Neither company has confirmed the offer. Since Google bought Wiz, buyers want a cloud security vendor that isn't owned by a cloud provider, and Upwind has picked up deeper AWS and Microsoft partnerships, per Globes. Customers named include Nubank, Carvana, Roku and ClickUp.
The technical edge. Most cloud security tools (the category is called CNAPP) start by scanning your cloud settings and code for weak spots, then sort them by how bad they look on paper. Upwind starts from runtime. It puts a small eBPF sensor on each server. eBPF lets a program safely watch what the Linux kernel is doing, so the sensor sees which processes actually run, which packages actually load and which network calls actually happen, with little performance cost. That lets a team set aside the long list of vulnerabilities that never run, focus on the ones that do, and catch an attack while it's happening.
What the money is for. Product and engineering, a bigger go-to-market push, and securing AI workloads. In September Upwind bought Aegis, a nine-month-old Israeli startup that protects AI agents, in an all-stock deal. Axios Pro's source valued it at $25M to $50M. Its founders now run the new Upwind AI Security Lab.
What to watch. Upwind hasn't disclosed exact ARR, how much of the $400M is new money versus secondary share sales, or how the round splits between investors. At close to 50 times ARR or more, Upwind has to keep growing very fast to justify the price. For buyers, a well-funded independent option strengthens your hand in Wiz, Palo Alto Cortex Cloud and CrowdStrike renewal talks.