Israeli cybersecurity company Upwind has announced the completion of a $400 million Series C financing round. The round is led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, Cyberstarts, Craft, Salesforce Ventures, Alta Park, Picture Capital, Swish Ventures, Cerca Partners, TCV, Penny Jar, and Leaders Fund and new investor Canapi Ventures.
The round indicates that Upwind, led by serial entrepreneur, cofounder and CEO Amiram Shachar, has decided to turn down DataDog’s $4 billion acquisition offer.
DataDog has been courting Upwind over the past few months, extending an acquisition offer close to the company’s valuation of $3.8 billion in the current financing round, at the time of its funding round. However, Upwind’s investors and founders are confident that the company is enjoying positive momentum and that its value is set to rise further. Consequently, they have finalized this new investment round.
DataDog, a US-based company traded on the Nasdaq with a market cap of $100 billion, is a market leader in the field of monitoring software systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI, a niche known as observability. Its platform enables organizations to gain a unified view of all activity across their applications, servers, databases, and networks.
Datadog maintains a development center in Israel; following Upwind’s rejection of the acquisition offer, Datadog will likely look to recruit additional talent in Israel to accelerate its own product development.
Upwind, says annual recurring revenue (ARR) has quadrupled since the beginning of the year, as many organizations seek security platforms tailored for complex cloud environments and AI workloads in the post-Wiz-acquisition-by-Google era. The company’s ARR for 2026 is estimated at $80 million or more.
In January, the company completed a financing round that valued it at $1.5 billion. "AI is fundamentally transforming cloud infrastructure architecture, the scope of cyber threats, and the way organizations build and operate software," said Shachar. "Enterprise security teams must understand how the cloud and AI interact in real-time to identify their most critical vulnerabilities, proactively remediate risks, and detect cyberattacks as they happen."
"Reshaping cybersecurity"
Last week, a major vulnerability was uncovered in the code underpinning servers and websites worldwide (PHP code). It affected about 70% of all websites connected to the internet and was subsequently targeted by AI-driven attacks from hackers and state-sponsored actors hostile to the West. The vulnerability was discovered using sophisticated AI models, while patching it required many companies to install software updates or employ local cybersecurity protection services.
In this landscape, where the vast majority of organizational code is already generated by autonomous development engines, and where vulnerabilities are both discovered via AI and exploited through AI-driven attacks, companies such as Upwind, Echo, Sweet, and Wiz are experiencing significant growth.
"The company’s cloud and AI security platform reshapes cybersecurity by operating from the inside out," Upwind explains. "It integrates context from cloud workloads, APIs, and client-side agents with real-time intelligence. This provides security, development, and infrastructure (DevOps) teams with a shared understanding of critical, exploitable risks and exposures, enabling them to remediate these issues and detect new attacks in real time."
Earlier this year, "Globes" revealed how Upwind secured an increased number of partnerships with Amazon and Microsoft cloud services following Google’s acquisition of Wiz. Its client roster includes digital bank Nubank, used-car retailer Carvana, video streaming service Roku, and ClickUp, a US-based competitor to monday.com.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 28, 2026.
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