Upwind led by Spot.io founders

This founding story signals that Upwind is not a first time team learning security from scratch, but an experienced cloud infrastructure team making a second bet on a much larger problem. Spot.io sold software that helped companies buy and manage cloud compute more efficiently, so its founders spent years inside the same AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes environments that Upwind now secures. That gives Upwind a concrete advantage in seeing how cloud systems actually run, fail, and get misconfigured in production.1 2 3 4

• Spot.io was a cloud cost and compute optimization company that NetApp acquired in July 2020 for $340M in cash, while investors and ecosystem writeups commonly frame the deal at about $450M. That exit gave the team both credibility and a playbook for selling infrastructure software into large enterprises.2 3 5
• Upwind reused much of that operating nucleus. External profiles tie Amiram Shachar, Tal Zur, Lavi Ferdman, and other former Spot leaders to Upwind’s 2022 launch. That matters because cloud security buyers often back teams that already know how to integrate deeply with AWS, containers, and enterprise procurement workflows.1 3 4 6
• The closest parallel is Wiz, another Israeli founded cloud security company built by repeat operators with prior cloud infrastructure experience. Wiz hit $500M ARR by July 2024 and was later acquired by Google for $32B, showing how fast this market rewards teams that can turn technical cloud insight into a broad security platform.6 7

Going forward, this background positions Upwind to keep expanding from cloud risk detection into a broader cloud and AI security platform. The same systems knowledge that once helped optimize compute spend can be turned into security workflow, incident response, and AI era protection, which is why investors have funded Upwind so aggressively through its October 28, 2026 Series C.1 4 7