Upwind Rejects $4B Datadog, Raises $400M at $3.8B
By @sharedot · · 8 pages
- Startups
- Venture Capital
- Cybersecurity
- Cloud Security
- Funding
Cloud security firm Upwind closed a $400M Series C at a $3.8B valuation after reportedly rejecting a nearly $4B Datadog takeover offer.
Upwind doubles down on independence with $400M Series C
Upwind Security has closed a $400 million Series C at a $3.8 billion valuation, with Bessemer Venture Partners leading the round and Canapi Ventures joining as a new investor alongside returning backers Cyberstarts, Greylock, Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital.
CEO Amiram Shachar said the capital will go toward product development and a broader go-to-market push.
A valuation that more than doubled in nine months
The surprise is the speed: in January 2026, Upwind raised a $250 million Series B led by Bessemer at a $1.5 billion valuation, per SiliconANGLE, and Tech Funding News reports Salesforce Ventures then followed at $1.6 billion. Nine months later, the round values the company at $3.8 billion.
SiliconANGLE also reports early-September chatter had the round at $300 million; it ultimately closed $100 million larger. Investors have now put roughly $830 million into the company, which was founded in 2022 by Shachar and former spot.io colleagues.
Revenue quadrupled, but the multiple is steep
Upwind says it quadrupled its revenue in 2026, and both HackerNoon and SiliconANGLE report the growth figure plainly.
Tech Funding News, citing The Information, reports annual recurring revenue rose from around $20 million at the end of 2025 to over $50 million — a 2.5x increase that puts the $3.8 billion valuation at roughly a 76x ARR multiple.
Customers named by the company include Siemens, Roku, Carvana, Nubank, Supabase and ClickUp, and hundreds of organizations use the platform, per SiliconANGLE.
What Upwind sells, and who it faces
Upwind's platform gathers runtime data across cloud workloads, APIs and AI agents, letting security teams see what is actually running rather than relying on periodic scans.
The company says AI agents can change cloud environments faster than human teams can keep up, so it built specialized AI agents to investigate alerts, validate findings and carry out fixes.
It runs on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud, with an AWS Security Hub integration allowing in-console access and unified billing. Competitors include Wiz — now owned by Google after its $32 billion acquisition — plus Palo Alto and CrowdStrike.
A founder's second act
Shachar sold his first company, spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million in 2020, and Tech Funding News reports nearly all of Spot's 60 employees joined him to found Upwind in 2022, alongside Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman and Tal Zur.
As of January, Upwind had over 300 employees with offices in the US, UK and Israel. Shachar framed the thesis bluntly: "Context is key to managing internal and external risks, security teams need to understand how cloud, and AI interact in real time."
The stakes for 2027
The market is growing fast — Dell'Oro expects the cloud security space to hit $12.9 billion by 2030 at nearly 30% annual growth, per Tech Funding News — but Upwind must now prove its revenue growth can justify a 76x multiple before another buyer emerges.
The company is also developing AI agents that investigate threats autonomously and validate attack-surface findings through red-team activity. The key question for 2027, as Tech Funding News puts it, is whether growth closes the gap between the valuation and the business.