March 2025 saw the biggest exit in the history of Israeli tech: Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz. The sale led Wiz’s longtime partners, Amazon and Microsoft, to seek out other cybersecurity companies not affiliated with their rival. Into the breach stepped Amiram Shachar’s cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security, which is now among the contenders for Wiz’s top spot in providing cybersecurity to tech giants.
Wiz was acquired by Google's cloud division with the aim of boosting revenue in that sector. The competitors could have easily seen the move as a strike at their most vulnerable point, the fastest-growing segment of their business, fueled by the AI boom. Amazon, one of Wiz's earliest partners, certainly cannot have viewed the development favorably.
Thus, shortly before Wiz's multibillion-dollar deal, when it was already clear to everyone that the deal was going ahead, Amazon signed an enhanced agreement with Upwind, a move that industry insiders described at the time as "acquiring the Israeli company without actually buying it." The reason was a special arrangement under which Amazon's sales team markets Upwind's product in exchange for a commission comparable in scale with that earned on Amazon's own products - an exceptional status that, until then, had been granted only to US company Databricks.
"Amazon interviewed a large number of cloud cybersecurity players, and over the past six months we have received feedback that, from our perspective, was pivotal," Shachar says, referring to the agreement first reported by "Globes." "The world's largest digital bank, the world's largest recycling company, and the world's largest car rental agency all chose our platform and told Amazon about it. I think that gave them good indications that this was a startup with major growth momentum."
Microsoft, which is at a major disadvantage compared with Google in the AI market, has made no dramatic moves on the matter, but "Globes" has learned that its salespeople recently began marketing Upwind's products on Microsoft Marketplace.
If these agreements continue, they could propel the company from being a small, insignificant competitor to Wiz into one of the chief beneficiaries of the market opportunity created by Google’s blockbuster acquisition.
The numbers already prove this out. Until last year, Upwind was a company generating just over $20 million in annual revenue. Today, it has reached an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $30 million, and if plans to become a genuine alternative to Wiz materialize, it expects to end the year with ARR of $100 million.
How do you compete in a market where Wiz is so dominant? For years, you were a small company that brought in maybe a few million dollars. Who pays attention to you?
"Wiz has proven that there is no glass ceiling in the cloud cybersecurity market, and their acquisition at this amount is excellent validation for any other company operating in the space. When a company is acquired, good things happen, like their integration with Google’s Gemini. But there is also an innovation curve, and as a private company, I can only hope that our curve will be faster than other companies."
"During a tough time, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told his staff something like, ‘We’re not competitor-obsessed, we’re customer-obsessed. Our competitors aren't going to pay us money anyway.’"
Shachar admits that fundraising for a company operating in Wiz's domain is no easy task. "I know dozens of entrepreneurs who wanted to do cloud security but said to themselves, ‘There's no way we're going into this sector when Wiz is so good. We don't want to get burned. But we just kept going, built the right team, raised money from good funds, and today I can say that there is already a very big barrier to entry in this market, and when I look at the next few years, I have no doubt we will be one of the world’s three leading companies in this market."
"I like hearing stories about failure"
Upwind didn’t plan to go head-to-head with Wiz. Previously, the two companies operated in slightly different areas: Wiz focused on securing the connection of external applications to the enterprise cloud, while Upwind concentrated on the real-time domain, enabling developers and security managers to see, in real time, issues that arise during development and when launching a product.
The overlap with Wiz emerged over time as part of the evolution of the cybersecurity industry. "As a founder, you’re told to focus on a very, very narrow area and expand from there, but then you discover that once you bring one product - the real-time layer - the customer asks you to bring additional, adjacent products, like cloud application protection and API security. And it makes sense for them to get as much as possible in one place," Shachar explains. "We learned this from our customers. At our offices, every meeting room is named for a different customer, and each one has a story behind it."
Upwind is not alone in the sector. Companies such as Echo Software and Sweet Security, both Israeli companies operating in the cloud security space, are also seeing rising demand for their services following Wiz’s exit. However, investors - including Bessemer Venture Partners and Picture Capital, founded by cybersecurity veterans such as Dan Amiga, Rakesh Loonkar, and Mickey Boodaei - appear to be placing their bets specifically on Upwind; in January, they led a $250 million investment in the company at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Your appetite for expansion has created friction with other cybersecurity companies - like Wiz and Cyera - which are also in your investors’ portfolio, for example through investors like Gili Raanan of Cyberstarts.
"In our market, anyone who didn’t respond in this way was left out of the game. Look at companies like Aqua Security, Orca Security, Sysdig, Lacework, Snyk, and Checkmarx. There were many companies specializing in a single solution that decided not to expand their product suite, and then suddenly Palo Alto Networks and Wiz came in and created a new status quo that customers came to expect. When I build something new, I like to hear not only success stories but also failures. Lacework was valued at $8 billion and it simply fell apart. I consulted people who knew the company in order to understand what happened there, so I wouldn’t have to figure it out when it was already too late."
And then a conflict of interest arose, like the fact that Gili Raanan sits on the board of Upwind and Wiz, two competing companies.
" It's not a wrestling match where only one wrestler comes out the winner. There’s enough room in our market for several players and it is possible to succeed together. Take, for example, Fortinet, which is already worth $90 billion and grew alongside Palo Alto Networks, which trades at a market cap of about $200 billion. But it's also important to say that at the time Gili Raanan met us, we were each at different points. Even today, the companies are at different stages, so the assistance he provides is unique to each company."
A tough life and a broken dream
The fact is, Shachar didn’t need any of this. He could have retired after selling his startup Spot in 2020 for about $450 million to US-based software company NetApp. But the 37-year-old entrepreneur, who divides his time between four homes in the US and Israel, was hungry for more.
In his case, this hunger is rooted in his personal life story. Shachar was born in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood in Jerusalem and his family later moved to Katamon, but he spent most of his childhood in the neighborhood of Gilo Bet, studying in religious schools. His father hadn’t been in the picture for as long as he can remember, and his mother raised him and his older sister on her own.
"The three of us were against the world, and my mother tried to give everything she had. She worked hard, was a nurse in a hospital and worked double shifts, just so I could buy my first computer," he recalls. "I think about how complicated that struggle for survival was. When life doesn’t deal you the right cards from the start, you have to fight hard just to reach a point where you can begin on equal footing, and my mother worked hard so her children would have better cards."
Shachar often found himself alone at home. "I had a lot of time fiddling with the computer - taking it apart and putting it back together," he says. "We took those difficult moments and turned them into adrenaline, a place where problems get solved. We invested our free time in creating, learning, and being curious and that may be the greatest gift I was ever given."
His childhood dream was to have a career playing soccer for Beitar Jerusalem, and for a while he even played as a midfielder in the youth league. But in the religious environment where he was raised, he could not participate in games on Saturdays. "It put an end to my soccer career," he says. "Up until 11th grade, I wore a kippah, and even today I am a person of faith. I think the great physicists said that those who know a little physics do not believe in God, but those who understand physics in depth believe very deeply in God."
By age 16, Shachar was working to support his family. "My reality as a child revolved around the question of how I could help my mother pay the rent and the bills. And, if I wanted to fulfill my dreams, I had to go out to work," he says. "I finished my matriculation exams quickly, so I didn't have to go to school anymore, which left me with time."
He made his first exit while at his first job, working as a shift manager for a shoe store in a Jerusalem shopping mall. Shachar noticed a recurring problem: customers couldn’t find what they were looking for at the store, the store would order the shoes from another branch, but customers were required to sign a commitment to pick them up. On his home computer, he developed a system for managing inventory and digital signatures. When he gave notice to his employer before going to the army, the chain asked to buy the software.
The solution that made him a millionaire
When it came time for him to enlist, Shachar, who already by 10th grade had completed five matriculation units in computers and mathematics, caught the attention of the IDF screening officers. He was assigned to do a course at MAMRAM, the IDF central computing system unit, far from the glamour of tech units 8200 and 81.
He was assigned to IDF DevOps, which is responsible for the IT infrastructures that operate a series of critical systems, and became a team leader. During his service, he went to night school and earned a BA in computer science at the College of Management. After his discharge, he became Director of DevOps at online advertising company Ybrant Media.
Shachar oversaw Ybrant's migration to the Amazon public cloud. "We tried to set up a server, but it turned out to be a much more expensive business than I thought. I thought I was going to spend $20,000, but was invoiced $300,000," he says. "That's why, for my studies, my final project posed the question: How do we reduce the costs and existing solutions, and create a system that will know exactly what we’re spending money on right now?"
Shachar achieved significant cost reductions in Amazon’s cloud services by using hosting on servers that Amazon classifies as surplus (spot instances). Amazon offers substantial discounts on these servers, but they also come with a risk. They can be reclaimed with just a few days’ notice. However, this solution is what made him a millionaire.
But turning the idea into a company wasn't such a piece of cake. "Everyone I approached to join was skeptical. They told me: it’s 2014, the idea you’re thinking about already exists, and it’s impossible to reduce Amazon’s costs, unless you’re Amazon," he recalls. "The venture capital investors said, 'Amazon will kill this idea quickly,' and there were countless other excuses. And I was young, 24-25 years old, just out of the army, saying to myself: 'Maybe they're right?'"
Shachar did not let skepticism deter him. "I kept talking to customers, and to Amazon, and I realized there was something interesting here. I set a goal for myself in the summer of that year: if I don't bring in three clients by September, I'll drop the idea and move on. All of a sudden, boom. In September, we already had eight clients."
The dam began to give way after Elie Wurtman of PICO Venture Partners, and Tamir Carmi of ironSource, wrote the first check for $50,000. But the floodgates opened only in 2017 when Intel Capital agreed to lead a fundraising round in which Spot raised over $50 million. "In the end, we used less than $6 million during that entire period. We managed to produce cash flow without scaling up staff at the same pace - that's how we made the company profitable."
"At first, I was jealous of entrepreneurs"
Four years passed, and then NetApp came with an acquisition offer for Spot. "In the delivery room, during the birth of my eldest daughter, I was still negotiating a $100 million private financing round. A few days later, while I was driving to buy diapers, I got a call from a vice president at NetApp who asked whether we were interested in entering acquisition talks," Shachar recalls. "I told him we had decided to take a different path and raise capital. When you say something like that to a company that wants to acquire you, it acts as a catalyst and within three weeks, we had an offer in hand."
The deal was signed days before the first Covid lockdown in Israel and the US. "I suddenly found myself a vice president of about 700 people all at once, responsible for many things happening at that company, all of this without ever having visited the offices," Shachar says. "The company was doing very well and growing, and I also came in motivated to develop Spot within the company for many more years. But then, a different emotion started to take hold: I would look at startup founders and think to myself: ‘They don’t understand what they have in hand.’"
"When you work in a large system, it's much harder to make decisions, move and make things happen. There's a lot more politics and when I’d talk to an entrepreneur over Zoom, I’d feel as if he'd like to be in my place - someone who’s sold his company - but he didn’t understand that I wanted to be in his place."
And so, a little more than two years after his big exit, Shachar was already on the lookout for the next thing, and recruited Gili Raanan, the first investor in Wiz. "All the investors gave me a blank check to set up the next thing, but the meeting with Gili changed everything - five minutes in, he said to me, ‘I can't explain why, but we'll probably start working together,’" says Shachar. "I went back to the investors and informed them they would be changing the company's share structure."
Basketball players Omri Casspi and Steph Curry, who previously played together on the same NBA team, also joined Shachar. Shachar, who was living in San Francisco at the time and was a devoted fan of their team, the Golden State Warriors, was given a tour of the locker room through a friend where he met Casspi. "We chatted a bit, and became good friends. It got to the point where we would go out to eat together after every game."
Shachar was thrilled to meet and connect with his personal hero while Casspi, who was already beginning to think about the next stage in his life as a venture capital investor, eagerly soaked up Shachar’s entrepreneurial stories and promised to invest in his next startup. He brought in Curry, and the two later became early investors in Upwind. Casspi recorded a handsome profit on paper from the investment, which also enabled him to raise his second fund, Swish Ventures.
In hindsight, what had you already understood a long time ago that successful cybersecurity founders who didn’t come from the same background as you, still don’t know?
"I once sat down for a beer with several army officers and we told each other our life story. And we realized that none of us had a father. All at once we understood how those life circumstances define your characteristics - leadership, initiative, responsibility. To this day, when I interview people for a job, I'm always curious to go back and see what they bring to the table, what built them, what their family mosaic is, and especially what they want to prove."
Today you’re a father of four, after a significant exit, with several beautiful homes around the world. What kind of parenting do you provide for your children? Do you feel the need to make up for what you went through along the way?
"I had an excellent math teacher named Menucha. We asked her, 'Why aren't you in high-tech, somewhere where you could earn more?' She answered, ‘If I worked in high-tech, I might have more money but even with more money, I wouldn't buy more clothes and I wouldn't eat more than I do every day.’ That statement helped me deal with the exit. Suddenly, when you’re in a reality where you have money, you realize that your self-fulfillment is achieved through doing and creating. There's a limit to how many clothes you can buy, or how many meals you can eat - that's what I'm trying to instill in my children."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 4, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.