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Cloud and AI security startup Upwind closed a $400M Series C at a $3.8B valuation led by Bessemer, nine months after a $1.5B round and a reported Datadog bid.
Key Takeaways
- Upwind raised a $400M Series C at a $3.8B valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
- The valuation is about 2.5x the $1.5B set in the January 2026 Series B.
- The Information reported that Upwind rejected a Datadog offer of nearly $4B.
Lead
Upwind, a cloud and AI security company based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, announced a $400M Series C on October 28, 2026, at a $3.8B valuation. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round. Canapi Ventures joined as a new investor, and Cyberstarts, Greylock Partners, Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital returned.
The round lifts total funding to roughly $830M. The company says revenue quadrupled in 2026 and will use the new capital for product development and a larger go-to-market team.
What Does Upwind Actually Sell?
Upwind sells a cloud security platform built around runtime data, meaning what workloads, APIs and AI agents do while they run rather than how they were configured. The product feeds those signals into one view for security and engineering teams. It also includes AI agents that investigate alerts and propose remediation.
The company runs on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud, and is sold through the AWS console with unified billing. Named customers include Siemens, Roku, Carvana, Nubank, Supabase and ClickUp. It competes with Wiz, now part of Google, as well as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks in cloud workload protection.
CEO Amiram Shachar founded the company in 2022 with Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman and Tal Zur. Shachar previously sold Spot.io to NetApp for about $450M in 2020, and nearly all of the roughly 60 employees from that company followed him to Upwind. Headcount now exceeds 300 across the US, UK and Israel.
Did Upwind Really Turn Down Datadog?
Upwind is reported to have declined a bid from Datadog of nearly $4B, but the claim is contested. The Information reported the offer, and other potential buyers were also said to have shown interest. Israeli outlet CTech cited information indicating Datadog never made the offer, and neither company has confirmed a bid publicly.
If the offer existed, the arithmetic is awkward. A bid near $4B would sit only marginally above the new $3.8B valuation, so the company would have declined a certain exit at roughly the price investors just set. That makes the Series C a bet that the next round or an IPO prices higher. Investors who joined at $3.8B are underwriting that bet.
Why Did the Valuation Jump So Fast?
The valuation rose 2.5x in nine months because revenue growth and the cloud security market's recent deal history both pushed it up. Upwind's annual recurring revenue reportedly climbed from about $20M at the end of 2025 to above $50M in 2026. At $50M, the $3.8B valuation implies a multiple near 76x.
That multiple is steep even by security standards. Buyers and investors have paid heavily for cloud security since Google agreed to acquire Wiz. Scarcity of independent platforms at scale is part of the price, and so is the pull of AI workloads, which are producing new attack surfaces faster than enterprises can inventory them.
The Series B in January 2026 raised $250M at $1.5B and was later reported to have been increased to a $1.6B valuation. Two rounds totaling $650M in under a year leave Upwind well capitalized against larger incumbents. They also set expectations that a young revenue base must now meet.
What Does the Round Mean for Competitors?
The round gives Upwind money to hire sales staff and extend its AI-agent features while larger platform vendors fold security into broader suites. Datadog, which sells observability and has been expanding into security, has so far lacked a runtime-first product of Upwind's size. If the bid story is accurate, a rejected offer at this level signals that a pure-play runtime security company can command more as a standalone business than a strategic buyer wants to pay.
Skeptics will point to the multiple and to the thin revenue base relative to the capital raised. Upwind has now raised more than $800M against about $50M of ARR. Growth at 4x leaves less room for a missed quarter at this price.
Outlook
Upwind enters its next phase with a $3.8B valuation, a lead investor that has backed it across two rounds, and an acquisition story it has not confirmed. Execution will decide whether the valuation holds: converting $50M of ARR into several multiples of that figure, and doing so against Google-owned Wiz and other large vendors. An IPO or a second approach from a strategic buyer remain the two exits most likely to test the price.
