JD Durkin: Co-Founder and CEO of Upwind, Amiram. Really good to have your perspective and to have you here on the show on this Friday. Let’s start first and foremost: what is Upwind, for anyone who might be a bit unfamiliar? And how would you define the key problems that you’re solving?
Amiram Shachar: Yeah, it’s great to be here. Happy Friday. Happy Halloween. So Upwind is the cloud and AI security platform. We’re helping enterprises around the world to secure their cloud infrastructure and their AI applications end to end. And what we’re really solving is, if you think about it, every enterprise runs a lot of cloud infrastructure, a lot of AI applications, and there’s so much risk that’s coming with the AI benefits.
And everybody is becoming a very sophisticated attacker with AI. And also, if you think about it, every employee we have in the company is becoming a developer. So the attack surface and the things we’re seeing in our infrastructure are much greater than we used to have. And Upwind helps you, first of all, understand the risk that you have in your environment. And second of all, if there is any attack happening in your company, you’re able to see it live and stop it in real time.
JD Durkin: With that point, it seems as if you’re growing pretty rapidly. And if I’m not mistaken, you also just did another raise. What have been the main factors driving that recent momentum?
Amiram Shachar: So yeah, first of all, we just raised the additional $400 million in Series C, followed by the Series B that we launched about seven months ago of $250 million. So that makes us really well capitalized to build and help defenders in this cloud and AI era. What really powers that is, I see that we’re living in a world with a lot of geopolitical situations. And there are more attacks generated by AI right now that we’re seeing, in the last month, than we’ve seen in the last four years combined. We’re getting into a new era. Customers understand that cybersecurity and AI is the most important intersection these days, so the demand for securing your cloud and AI is becoming really, really high.
And second of all, [unclear: “is happening is”] taking a platform approach. So we’re bringing a lot of capabilities that customers might have found in different tools, and we’re bringing them together. So the ease of use, the simplicity, the user experience, in a world where generating software becomes so easy, the user experience and the ease of use is really one of the most important things. And we’re happy to meet the customers where they are.
JD Durkin: Amiram, I’ve got less than 30 seconds. With a look to the future, how does cloud and AI security continue to evolve from here?
Amiram Shachar: So I think what AI has done to cloud is that we were in a very centralized world. Everything is in the cloud, so you’ve got to protect the cloud. But now AI has proven that AI is everywhere. So AI is on the endpoint, it’s on the laptops, it’s on the SaaS providers, it’s in the cloud too. So I think what’s going to be the next three years is how we’re not just securing the cloud, but how we’re securing AI everywhere it lives, and it lives everywhere. So that’s a really beautiful mission to execute on. And I think AI is going to bring amazing benefits to the world. We’re going to see diseases disappearing very soon. And we’re really excited to help the world use it very safely.
JD Durkin: I’m up against a hard break. I’ve got to leave it there. Amiram Shachar, Co-Founder and CEO of Upwind. Thanks for joining us.
