Upwind raises $400M Series C to secure cloud and AI infrastructure as cyber threats accelerate

Upwind, the cloud and AI security platform co-founded by Amiram Shachar, has raised a $400M Series C backed by Bessemer Venture Partners. Founded in 2023, Upwind secures the full lifecycle of cloud infrastructure and AI workloads, from development through deployment to runtime.

“Appoint protects the cloud and AI for the world... We've been around since 2023 and growing fast... 400,000,000. That's a lot of money. And I can tell you that this is what's needed to operate in that very important space. It puts us as one of the most capitalized companies on the planet to secure the cloud and AI.”

The differentiation

Shachar's pitch leans on background, not pedigree. Upwind's founding team came from DevOps and infrastructure, not traditional cybersecurity. Shachar previously built Spot.io, which helped thousands of enterprises optimize compute on AWS, Azure, and GCP. That operational context, he argues, lets Upwind help security teams understand risk in terms of how infrastructure actually works, rather than surfacing alerts that no one can act on.

The product takes a platform approach, aimed squarely at displacing fragmented point solutions. Shachar frames the target buyer as a CISO with limited capacity to manage hundreds of vendors, and positions Upwind against the large security platforms rather than trying to add to the stack.

AI as accelerant, for attackers and defenders

The threat environment is the tailwind. Shachar's view is that open-source models have made meaningful cyberattacks accessible to far more people, compounding pressure on enterprises that are already targets in an unstable geopolitical climate. He draws a distinction the market sometimes blurs: many current breaches involve legacy infrastructure, not AI-generated code. Vibe coding may eventually introduce its own vulnerabilities, but the more immediate problem is organizations running decade-old stacks that were never hardened.

The vibe coding dynamic does touch Upwind internally. Shachar recounts watching one of his own developers ship a feature entirely through prompting. The developer reported coding time down 90%, but code review time up 600%, a tradeoff that reinforces the security thesis: more code gets written faster, but the review burden grows with it.

Shachar describes the $400M as what's required to operate credibly in a space this critical. At that capitalization level, Upwind is positioning itself as one of the most funded companies focused on cloud and AI security.