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

Speaker 2: Goodbye. Up next, we are running a little bit late, but we're bringing in the cofounder and CEO of Upline. We have Amiram. Welcome to the show. The first appearance with a massive Here he from Bessemer. How are doing? Welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Speaker 8: Hey, guys. Amiram here. Thank you for having me. Cofounder and CEO of Upland. Yeah. Very glad to be here.

Speaker 2: Amazing. And, introduce the business. What is the elevator pitch, the logline these days?

Speaker 8: Appoint protects the cloud and AI for the world. Sure. There is a lot of cloud infrastructure out there, a lot of AI usage. Yeah. And Appoint has built a platform that secures all of it from the entire life cycle. We've been around since 2023 and

Speaker 2: growing fast. Super important. I can imagine you're growing very, very fast. What is the actual go to market motion like today? I mean, cybersecurity is on the top of everyone's mind. Ilya Sutzkever is tweeting about how neo clouds need better cybersecurity. Is is it just, buy, buy, everyone just pulling every tool in, or are you actually going up against other cybersecurity firms for rip and replace? Are you additive? How do you plug in and just wind up achieving the mission of securing infrastructure more broadly?

Speaker 8: Yes. I think first is cybersecurity is having a big moment with AI. Yeah. Alright. Let's face it. Every, like, person is a hacker Yeah. With, like, open source models. Like, you get the damage you can create Yeah. And let alone, like, the people who really wanna create damage. Like, you know, a lot of enterprises are target for attackers. Yeah. We're, like, in a very, like, complex geopolitical situation in the world. So, like, there is a lot of things, like, that are happening on the cybersecurity front, and AI just makes it, like, stimulating it. Yeah. And the way we're thinking about it is basically the way to secure it is really about the platform approach because if you think about the average CISO, when they need to buy a security tool, how much real estate do you really have to deploy all these thousands of vendors? So we've been taking a platform approach that can actually take you all the way from protecting secure development, secure deployment in the cloud, secure runtime in the cloud, and now AI lives everywhere. So we are really coming against, like, to your question, against the platforms, like the big platforms, and we think that's the right place to be because this is what customers really want. Is your experience at Spot, and maybe you can tell the audience what you were doing there, relevant here because you've seen the nature of,

Speaker 2: enterprise cloud surface areas, and so you know what solutions will, be adopted most aggressively?

Speaker 8: You know, when when I go on a on a call with customers Yeah. And they ask me, what's unique about Outpoint? What's... Can you tell us what's what's the differentiation of Outpoint? So I tell them the first thing is that we're not coming from cybersecurity background. Yeah. We're building a cybersecurity company, not with cybersecurity background. Like, our background is from, like, you know, DevOps and infrastructure. We had a company before called Spot. Io. We helped thousands of organizations to scale their compute infrastructure efficiently on AWS, on Azure, on GCP. Mhmm. And that knowledge of understanding how DevOps people think, how infrastructure is wired Yeah. How CloudOps is working, it's helping us to, like like help security team unlock context of operations that they never had before. And that's actually the X factor of solving, like taking a problem from like a like a security finding and alert into, like, a real... Something that I really understand the risk and I can really fix it. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: How is, how is... Like, what is the state of vibe coding right now that we we all kind of predicted that, you know, there'd be tons of slop and stuff would might start breaking and it's kind of happening, but it's not even fully... I I I I don't think it's fair to put the blame for some of these cybersecurity attacks on vibe coding. A lot of people have... Are breaking into systems that are just like, yeah. Actually, it's just somebody who was running PHP and the normal, like, lamp lamp stack. They didn't vibe code anything because they built it ten years ago, now they're vulnerable. And so when you're talking to CEOs, CIOs, what are the threat models that they're most worried about today?

Speaker 8: You know what? I'll just tell you, like, a funny story. Like, we had last week. We had, like, a really important feature that I wanted to be deployed as soon as possible. Sure. So I went to the developer, I said, I'm gonna go on a on a Zoom with you right now to make sure, like, we're deploying it Mhmm. Because there's, like, some, you know, final things. And then I go on a call, he's sharing my... The screen, and I tell him, like, change this, do that. Mhmm. And then the guy doesn't write code.

Speaker 2: He's just prompting? He's like Yeah. It's just like prompting. Yeah. It's like, change this, do that. Sounds like somebody out of the office space. Shouldn't have done that. So your job is to take the prompt from the CEO and give it to Codex and Cloud Code. And I could just dictate. To the agents.

Speaker 8: Kind of... It's more or not. Yeah. And then I asked him, so, like, so that's what we're doing right now. Okay. So, like, we're just prompting. Yeah. And then he said, like, yeah, like, my coding, like, time has dropped down by 90% Woah. But the review time is up by 600%.

Speaker 2: Sure. Sure. Yeah. So So part of the midnight oil. So I think, like, you have to be really, really smart on, like, how to review that. Yeah. I think Karpathy had a take about this where he said, like, your Review this. Your code Review this, ability atrophies while your code reading ability increases. And that's probably more important than ever in the modern era. Fascinating. Well, tell us about the round. A series c, how big was it? How much did you raise?

Speaker 9: 400,000,000. Let's

Speaker 1: go. Congrats. He's not playing. He's playing. Let's not go.

Speaker 8: That's... You know, that... That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. And I I I can tell you that this is what's needed Yeah. To operate in that very important space. Yeah. Like, it's a super important space. You have to build. You have to innovate. We have big dreams now. Like, we can translate those dreams into execution. We have the right amount of cash and lots of trust from investors, a lot of trust from customers. And yeah, it puts us as like one of the most capitalized companies on the planet to secure that cloud and AI.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We need it more than ever now. We saw it with the PHP hack. So thank you for everything you're doing. Super important. Good luck, and thank you so much for your time to come on the show. Have a great rest of your day. Appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Dude. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You're trying to get more than 400,000,000.