Report No. 051 · Sun, 1 Nov 2026

Startup Scout: Upwind

Today's pick

Upwind

A cloud and AI security platform that uses runtime sensors instead of periodic scans to tell security teams which exposures are actually exploitable right now.

upwind.io

Cloud Security / AI Security · San Francisco, California

Series C · $400M

38/50Scout score

Problem: 8
Traction: 8
Founders: 8
Market: 8
Novelty: 6

Why today

Today's pick is Upwind, the San Francisco cloud and AI security startup that announced a 400 million dollar Series C on October 28, 2026, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, which also led its January Series B, with Canapi Ventures joining as a new backer alongside existing investors Cyberstarts, Greylock Partners, Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and TCV. The round values Upwind at 3.8 billion dollars, up from 1.5 billion dollars nine months earlier, and brings its total funding since 2022 to more than 800 million dollars. It lands just days after Upwind turned down an acquisition offer worth nearly 4 billion dollars from Datadog, a signal its team believes the independent path is worth more than a quick exit. The same stretch produced a run of smaller but notable rounds: London's Circuit Mind raised an 18.5 million dollar Series A to automate circuit board design, San Francisco's Plato raised 16 million dollars to build simulated workplaces for training AI agents, London's Easol raised a 30 million dollar Series A extension to put AI agents inside experience businesses, and Massachusetts industrial holding company Re:Build raised 2.1 billion dollars to expand US manufacturing capacity. Upwind stands out because a four-year-old company just quadrupled its revenue, walked away from a nine-figure acquisition offer, and raised at two and a half times its own valuation from nine months earlier, all while competing against well-funded incumbents like Wiz and Orca in one of cybersecurity's most crowded categories.

Problem

As companies move more infrastructure to the cloud and let AI agents write code and touch production systems, tools that scan configurations periodically or rely on API level visibility alone were not built for that speed or opacity. Workloads span multiple clouds, spin up and down within minutes, and trigger actions through agents nobody watched get built. The result is prioritization chaos: alert volumes overwhelm teams while dangerous misconfigurations and exposed secrets sit buried among thousands of low-risk warnings. Upwind argues this gap, between what AI changes in production and what teams can actually see as it happens, keeps widening as agentic AI spreads further into live systems.

Product

Upwind runs a cloud native application protection platform built around runtime telemetry rather than periodic scanning alone. It combines agentless cloud scanning with eBPF-based sensors that watch workloads, APIs and AI agents as they actually behave, then uses that context to prioritize which vulnerabilities are truly exploitable instead of flagging everything equally. The platform bundles cloud security posture management, container and Kubernetes security, code scanning, data security and a newer AI security layer into a single product and pricing tier, and now ships dedicated AI agents that investigate threats, validate attack surfaces and help remediate risk across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Traction

Upwind says hundreds of organizations now run its platform, including Siemens, Roku, Carvana, Nubank, Supabase and ClickUp, with security leaders at HedgeServ, Ping and Confluent crediting it with faster setup and clearer visibility than prior tools. According to reporting from The Information, annual recurring revenue grew from roughly 20 million dollars at the end of 2025 to more than 50 million dollars by this round, and the company says revenue quadrupled over the course of 2026. That growth was enough to draw a near 4 billion dollar acquisition offer from Datadog, which Upwind rejected in favor of raising fresh capital and staying independent.

Team

Upwind was founded in 2022 by chief executive Amiram Shachar alongside Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman and Tal Zur. Shachar is a repeat founder: he previously built Spot.io, a cloud cost and workload optimization company, and sold it to NetApp for 450 million dollars in 2020, giving him firsthand experience with how fast an infrastructure startup needs to move to win enterprise trust. The team has grown past 300 employees across offices in San Francisco, the United Kingdom and Israel, a structure common among security startups that pair Israeli technical talent with a US-facing commercial organization.

Funding

Upwind raised 400 million dollars in a Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners, which also led its 250 million dollar Series B nine months earlier, with new investor Canapi Ventures joining existing backers Cyberstarts, Greylock Partners, Craft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, TCV, Alta Park Capital and others. The round, announced October 28, 2026, values Upwind at 3.8 billion dollars, roughly two and a half times the 1.5 billion dollar valuation it carried in January, and brings total funding since 2022 to more than 800 million dollars. Earlier reporting had described a smaller round in the works before it was upsized to 400 million dollars by close.

Competitors

Upwind competes most directly with Wiz, the agentless cloud security platform that has become the category's dominant player, and Orca Security, another agentless specialist, along with CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Sysdig and Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud. Upwind's pitch is architectural: where Wiz and Orca built their reputations scanning cloud environments through APIs without deploying sensors, Upwind combines that agentless approach with eBPF-based runtime sensors that observe workloads directly, and sells CSPM, runtime protection, code scanning and AI security as one bundled product rather than separate add-ons. Whether that combination beats Wiz's scale and Orca's head start is the question investors are now backing with a 3.8 billion dollar valuation.

VC lens

Would YC fund it? Yes, with reservations: a repeat founder who already built and sold a cloud company, revenue that quadrupled in a year, and a credible rejection of a near 4 billion dollar buyout are exactly the signals YC looks for, but the cloud security category is now crowded enough with well-capitalized incumbents that execution speed matters more than the architecture pitch.

Biggest risk: Upwind's runtime-plus-agentless combination is a real technical differentiator today, but Wiz and other incumbents have the capital and distribution to copy any feature that proves valuable, and a 3.8 billion dollar valuation on roughly 50 million dollars of annual recurring revenue leaves little room for growth to slow before the next round gets much harder to justify.

Runners-up

Circuit Mind

A London AI startup whose software generates and verifies electronic circuit board designs from engineering requirements, which raised 25 million dollars in total financing, including a previously undisclosed seed and an 18.5 million dollar Series A led by Norwest with Third Prime, Differential Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures and new investor Lightscape VC participating. (Oct 28)

Plato

A San Francisco startup that builds simulated workplaces, copying the software and tasks of jobs like customer support, finance and healthcare administration, so AI labs can train and evaluate agents without touching live systems, which raised a 16 million dollar Series A led by Nava Ventures with Gradient Ventures, Transpose Platform and Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman participating. (Oct 28)

Easol

A London experience commerce platform for festival promoters and tour operators that launched an AI agent suite called Teammates for sales, support and operations, which raised a 30 million dollar Series A extension split between 20 million dollars in equity from Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, FMZ Ventures, Notion Capital and Eight Roads and a 10 million dollar debt facility from Viola Credit. (Oct 28)

Re:Build Manufacturing

A Massachusetts industrial holding company founded by former Amazon commercial chief executive Jeff Wilke that designs and manufactures hard tech products for aerospace, defense and other sectors while incubating new industrial startups, which raised 2.1 billion dollars co-led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group. (Oct 27)

Archive

51 reports · click a row to open it

Date	Winner	One-liner	Runners-up
2026-11-01	Upwind	400 million dollar Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners at a 3.8 billion dollar valuation, as the cloud and AI security startup quadrupled revenue and turned down a near 4 billion dollar acquisition offer from Datadog	Circuit Mind, Plato, Easol, Re:Build Manufacturing
2026-10-31	Hyperbolic	30 million dollar Series A-1 led by Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan's Walden Catalyst, as the AI compute marketplace aggregating 30 cloud providers into one dashboard pushes toward letting idle GPU capacity trade like electricity	Braid, Bites, Midstream Health, Crux Labs
2026-10-30	Dream	17 million dollar seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, as the ex-Palantir founders' AI world models took on architect-of-record liability for commercial buildings already under construction in Texas and California	Ravical, VUSE XR, KineDB, Ace Blend
2026-10-29	Numeracle	28 million dollar growth investment from Edison Partners, as the profitable McLean, Virginia company's business identity verification tools kept legitimate calls from 4,000 customers from being wrongly flagged as spam	Machenta, Vera Health, Autofixer, Zorit
2026-10-28	Simplismart	14 million dollar Series B led by Dallas Venture Capital with Nvidia participating, as the Bengaluru AI inference startup's annualised revenue run rate grew 14x in six months on the back of US customers like HeyGen and Shiprocket	Nova Spectral AI, Live2.ai, Mochatrade, Troovy
2026-10-27	Bedrock Robotics	600 million dollar Series C co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital at a 4.1 billion dollar valuation, as the Waymo-founded startup's retrofit kit for autonomous excavators moved from pilots to paid commercial work on job sites in Nevada, Texas and Arizona	Matiks, Nous, adsilico, Volare
2026-10-26	Blacksmith	66 million dollar Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a 1 billion dollar valuation, as the YC-backed CI platform's weekly jobs run grew from 5 million to over 90 million amid a flood of AI-written code	Enact Intelligence, QuantrolOx, Beyond Vision, Maxinsights
2026-10-25	Flapping Airplanes	1 billion dollar Series A at a 6 billion dollar valuation co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, as the year-old AI efficiency lab's valuation quadrupled nine months after its seed with still no shipped product	Air Space Intelligence, Whop, Arda Industries, AuxoAI
2026-10-24	CureBay	100 crore rupee Pre-Series C led by IvyCap Ventures, as the rural healthcare startup's network of technology enabled clinics and community health workers across seven Indian states passes 1.7 million patients served	Slingshot Insurance, Firstwork, Karta AI, Chapter Home
2026-10-23	Warhound	200 million dollar round at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation from In-Q-Tel, Sequoia and 8VC, as Colossal Biosciences founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey launch a company that genetically engineers and clones working dogs for the military and arms them with Anduril sensor gear	Enact, Beyond Vision, QuantrolOx, Indurex
2026-10-22	Legora	550 million dollar Series E at an 8.8 billion dollar valuation led by Atreides Management, as the legal AI company's annual recurring revenue doubled past 200 million dollars in six months while US in-house legal teams became its fastest-growing customer base	Pigment, Opply, Photon Bridge, Blacksmith
2026-10-21	Daytona	60 million dollar Series B at a 1 billion dollar valuation led by FirstMark, as the AI agent sandbox company's revenue run rate rose twenty-five fold in nine months on a customer list including Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition and Meta	Blackwall, Vessla, Linkener, Coherence Quantum
2026-10-20	Tenstorrent	1.5 billion dollar round at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its 2024 mark, as chip architect Jim Keller's inference-chip startup turns down Intel and Qualcomm buyout interest to keep challenging Nvidia independently	Town, Hunar.AI, Rabot Energy, Otter Health
2026-10-19	Modal Labs	750 million dollar Series D led by Accel at a 15.75 billion dollar valuation, as the AI infrastructure startup says its annualized run rate crossed 1 billion dollars with usage tripling in five months, built on serverless GPU access for inference, training and agent sandboxes	OMass Therapeutics, Scanntech, North.cloud, Fortem Technologies
2026-10-18	Mueon	65 million dollar Series A led by Maverick Silicon, as the Portland semiconductor startup founded by two Intel veterans scales Cubelets, modular 3D blocks bundling compute, memory, power and cooling to cut AI data center power and density limits, already in use by AI chip startup d-Matrix	Estuary Biotherapeutics, Fission, Otter Health, HyLight
2026-10-17	Chariot Claims	10 million dollar Series A led by Silverton Partners, as the rebranded ClaimClam legal-tech platform scales automated matching of consumers to mass arbitration and class-action claims over hidden fees and hard-to-cancel subscriptions, building on more than 65,000 claims already processed toward an estimated 92 million dollars in settlements	Marklo, Siena, Rein Security, Peppermint
2026-10-16	Salience Labs	125 million dollar oversubscribed Series B led by Bullhound Capital, as the Oxford-spun-out photonics company wins new backing from AMD Ventures and Intel Capital for all-optical circuit switches meant to break the power and latency ceiling facing electronic switches as AI GPU clusters scale toward tens of thousands of chips	Navra, Type One Energy, Oratomic, Gallatin AI
2026-10-15	Soufflé Therapeutics	135 million dollar Series B led by Juvia Group, as the MIT bioengineer Robert Langer-founded biotech works to deliver RNA medicines to muscle and heart tissue, a problem that has stalled the entire siRNA drug class, backed by more than 3.5 billion dollars in big pharma partnerships before any program has reached the clinic	ICON, Pluto Security, Nous Research, Atomic Machines
2026-10-14	Vitalize	31 million dollar Series A led by Oak HC and FT, as the Y Combinator-backed startup unifying hospital staffing, scheduling, patient flow and capacity management expands after enterprise customers reported cutting manual scheduling work and premium labor spend	Gallatin AI, byteXL, Desible.ai, Credfix
2026-10-13	Universal Quantum	100 million dollar Series A co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, a record raise for a UK quantum computing company, as the University of Sussex spinout races to prove its modular trapped-ion chiplet interconnect can out-scale newly public rivals Quantinuum and IonQ	Atlas Atomics, Type One Energy, Sabi, Catalyst
2026-10-12	Manus	500 million dollar funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, the general AI agent's first raise since China blocked Meta's 2 billion dollar bid for the company and barred its founders from leaving the country, as Manus pursues a reported 4 billion dollar valuation on roughly 125 million dollars of annualized revenue	Oratomic, Matchpoint Therapeutics, Oxide Computer, Stuut
2026-10-11	Arena	200 million dollar Series B co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures at a 3.1 billion dollar valuation, as the company behind the Chatbot Arena leaderboard nearly doubles its valuation in ten months on roughly 100 million dollars of annualized revenue from selling AI evaluation and alignment benchmarking to labs and enterprises, while Scale AI's new Seal Showdown contests its neutral-referee position	Gallatin AI, Rein Security, Rivercell, TeddyHoldings.AI
2026-10-10	Multiply Labs	75 million dollar Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks with new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures, as the decade-old biologics-manufacturing robotics company passes 100 million dollars raised on the strength of its first commercial sale, an up to 85 million dollar deal with Retro Biosciences, while competing against well-funded rivals Cellares and Ori Biotech to automate cell and gene therapy production	Zomint, Parakeet Health, OuterSignal, Efficient Computer
2026-10-09	RougeTx	58 million dollar Series A led by BioGeneration Ventures and Angelini Ventures with the European Investment Bank's Aurea facility and Kurma Partners also investing, as the Leiden University Medical Center spinout launches the first disease-modifying candidate for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, a bleeding disorder with no approved therapies, built on more than two decades of pericyte research	GMI Cloud, Varda Space Industries, doxx.net, Beyond Appliances
2026-10-08	General Medicine	120 million dollar Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz with Eli Lilly and Mercy Health joining, as the PillPack founders' online healthcare marketplace brings total funding to 152 million dollars less than three years after launch on hundreds of thousands of customers and an 80 Net Promoter Score	Noah, Nous Research, Buntar Aerospace, Monid
2026-10-07	Vinci	250 million dollar Series B at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora Innovation, as the Palo Alto physics foundation model startup jumps from a 46 million dollar seed and Series A disclosed last December to a tenfold valuation leap less than a year later, aiming its technology at chip design incumbents Cadence and Synopsys	Spiko, Hadrian, WhiteLab Genomics, Inbolt
2026-10-06	Pandektes	13.5 million euro Series A led by Munich's Alstin Capital, as the Copenhagen legal-research startup grows revenue sixfold and wins customers switching off LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck and Karnov with an API-first legal data platform	OneByZero, Fleuret AI, Laki Power, RobCo
2026-10-05	PaleBlueDot AI	200 million dollar Series C at a 3.2 billion dollar valuation led by ComputeCore, as the Palo Alto AI compute platform nearly triples its valuation in under nine months on more than 5 billion dollars of signed customer contracts	Simple Energy, Elio Mortgage, Menos AI, SedMed
2026-10-04	Flow Engineering	50 million dollar Series B at a 750 million dollar valuation co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management, as the AI-native systems-engineering platform for hardware teams grows to over 100 million requirements managed and adds General Motors, Anduril and Intuitive Machines as customers less than a year after its Series A	Miter, Kanu AI, Beltic, Satlyt
2026-10-03	EliseAI	350 million dollar round at a 4 billion dollar valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, as the housing and healthcare conversational AI company nearly doubles its valuation in thirteen months on 200 million dollars of ARR and five straight years of 100 percent revenue growth	Kahua, Breye Therapeutics, Amara, Kuro
2026-10-02	Armadin	255.5 million dollar Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, as Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia's agentic attacker-swarm security platform runs live attack campaigns for Fortune 500 and government customers seven months after stealth	Foundational, Seeds Fincap, Numeral, Chamelio
2026-10-01	General Intuition	220 million dollar Series B at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, nearly tripling in three months, as the AI foundation model startup trains action models on billions of gameplay clips from its own sister company Medal	Varda, Jeeves, Sand.ai, Arivihan
2026-09-30	Tiny Health	Oversubscribed $33M Series B led by B Capital as the at-home microbiome testing company posts 1,624% three-year revenue growth and quadruples its practitioner-facing business	Modulate, erad, Baselayer, Ande
2026-09-29	Instinct	$1B Series C led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10B valuation, a roughly 4x jump in five weeks, as its text-message AI agent passes 100,000 users with 10% daily compounding growth	SiMa.ai, Quartermaster, Outmarket AI, Humanos
2026-09-28	Solcoa Industries	$75M seed ($45M equity led by Bain Capital Ventures plus $30M JPMorgan-anchored debt) to build a 500-tonne Nevada plant using a novel rare-earth metalmaking process, aimed at breaking China's 95% grip on metallization	Clastix, Prevision Medicine, Spiich, Barq
2026-09-27	Ultraviolette	$85M Series E led by Yali Capital and TDK Ventures; Bengaluru performance EV motorcycle maker plans US entry by 2027 on 4-5x revenue growth	Micro1, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Dextr AI
2026-09-26	Island	$400M Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4B valuation, more than doubling its 2024 valuation as the enterprise browser expands into governing AI agents	Cyera, Confido, Heidi Health, Firecrawl
2026-09-25	Ema	$77M Series B led by Creaegis, more than quadrupling its valuation as every existing backer doubled down and Wipro scales its AI Employees to 240,000+ workers	Ando, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Nuvah
2026-09-24	TEKEVER	$580M Series D led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford; Ukraine-proven AI surveillance drone maker hits $6.4B valuation on a new 400M pound UK Army contract	Enveda Biosciences, Basecamp Research, Numeral, Brahma AI
2026-09-23	Verda	$189M oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital; profitable Nordic GPU cloud crosses $1B valuation on $165M ARR	Snorkel AI, Nexstrom, MacroCycle, Demoverse
2026-09-22	BCI-Sonics	RMB 200M (~$30M) Pre-Series A led by HSG and Yunqi Capital; non-invasive ultrasound brain-computer interface racing China's invasive BCI leaders and OpenAI-backed Merge Labs	Spott, HighLife, CellPoint, Benford
2026-09-22	Amber Electric	€49M Series E led by Morgan Stanley's 1GT; automates 50%+ of Australia's home batteries, expanding VPP software into Europe via E.ON	Corridor, Paymob, Unit1 Studio, Drivn
2026-09-18	TypeSafe AI	$40M seed led by DCVC; "System One" model returns typed decisions for software, not chat — built by RLHF co-inventor Diogo Almeida	Space Epoch, Facilo, Treble Technologies, DheyaTech
2026-09-17	Exein	$270M Series C at $1.7B valuation (30x in 2 yrs); kernel-level security layer for robots, drones and autonomous machines	Anew Labs, Delos Data, CADDi, AIUC
2026-09-16	Euclyd	€200M+ Series A; Samsung-backed (investor + manufacturer) AI inference chip built to out-efficiency Nvidia, chaired by ex-ASML CEO	Profound, Flam, ENCOS, Nutshell Therapeutics
2026-09-15	Fortaegis	$50M oversubscribed Series A; quantum-safe security rooted in silicon, chaired by Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan	Qupital, Tandem Health, Atomarine, UniqYou
2026-09-11	Positron AI	$875M Series C at $5B valuation; memory-first inference chips challenging Nvidia's HBM lock-in	The Boring Company, Mach Industries, Rogo Technologies, Swish
2026-09-10	Cognition AI	$2B+ Series E at $48B valuation; Devin autonomous coding agent nears $900M run-rate	DigitalPaani, Algomatic Dynamics, Limetax, Fundly.ai
2026-09-09	Bluecore Energy	Floating nuclear reactor barges for ports; $50M seed just 2 months after stealth launch	QNu Labs, ARC Ride, Circolife, Hope Care
2026-09-08	Pixxel	$100M Series C, India's largest spacetech round; building orbital AI data centers	Nua, Navana.ai, GalaxEye, Atoms (Kalanick)
2026-09-07	Medulance	GPS-dispatched ambulance network raises ₹24 Cr Series A-2	Comet, Mokobara, Kit (Speakeasy), XDOF