--- title: "TechCrunch — Upwind raises $400M after walking away from Datadog acquisition offer" url: https://stacklist.com/card/ce79fe0c-75a0-4b69-8ee2-7f2af98eb009 source_url: "https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/28/upwind-raises-400m-after-walking-away-from-datadog-acquisition-offer" stack: https://stacklist.com/c/finance/stack/af94eecb-fc01-43a7-8b78-f12bfa15d76b summary: "Upwind, a cloud security startup, raised $400M in Series C funding at a $3.8B valuation after declining a Datadog acquisition offer at the same price. The company chose to remain independent and continue growing rather than accept the acquisition deal." tags: "cloud-security, funding, startup, acquisition, series-c, valuation" key_entities: "Upwind (organization), Datadog (organization), TechCrunch (organization), cloud-security (concept), Series-C-funding (concept)" classification: "news" content_hash: "sha256:c1324482864eaa2a4b245e3c245dcfa3d5ef0564f56d15cc3e6af08b7c9ec9ce" acp_version: "0.2" token_counts_approximate: 4549 visibility: public agent_accessible: true status: "final" --- # TechCrunch — Upwind raises $400M after walking away from Datadog acquisition offer –:–:–:– Buy One Founder Summit Ticket, Get a Second for Free. Register now. Founder Summit begins Nov. 4, 9:00 a.m. ET. Get your pass savings & deals before it starts. REGISTER HERE. Close
Image Credits: Traitov / Getty Images Security Upwind raises $400M after walking away from Datadog acquisition offer Marina Temkin 4:15 PM PDT · October 28, 2026 Upwind, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to secure cloud infrastructure, has raised a $400 million Series C round at a $3.8 billion valuation led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers including Greylock Partners and Craft Ventures. The round comes nine months after Upwind closed its previous $250 million financing at a $1.5 billion valuation . The fresh funding, which has been in the works for months, nearly fell apart after Datadog attempted to buy the company, according to a person familiar with Upwind. Datadog is a publicly traded company that sells tools for monitoring how software runs, known as observability. It didn’t offer a premium above the $3.8 billion valuation set by venture capital investors, the person said, so Upwind decided to stay independent. Four-year-old Upwind has grown rapidly amid rising AI-driven cybersecurity threats. The startup has been adding $20 million to $30 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) each quarter and is projected to end the year at roughly $90 million, according to a person familiar with Upwind’s financials. That means that VCs and Datadog valued the startup at more than 40 times its forecast ARR, a common yardstick for pricing software companies. The high multiple is also well below the 80x ARR fetched by Cyera, another fast-growing cybersecurity startup, according to TechCrunch reporting from earlier this year. Cybersecurity is poised to be the third big wave of AI software that companies will pay for after AI coding tools and customer support, Theory Ventures general partner Tomasz Tunguz recently wrote in his widely read blog. By walking away from an acquisition offer, Upwind clearly believes that the company will ultimately be worth more than the $3.8 billion that Datadog was ready to pay for it. However, given how few cybersecurity companies have gone public in recent years, an eventual sale remains the most likely outcome for the startup. Upwind continues to draw acquisition interest, according to a person familiar with the company. The startup was founded by Amiram Shachar, who sold his previous company, the cloud spend management startup Spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million. Upwind calls its approach to thwarting threats “runtime” security, which means it alerts and remedies attacks and vulnerabilities in active services in real time. TechCrunch has reached out to both Upwind and Datadog for comment. Topics Bessemer Venture Partners , cloud security , Datadog , Security , Startups , upwind When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Marina Temkin Reporter, Venture Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation. You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal. View Bio November 4 Boston Buy One Pass, Get a Second Free Cover more ground at TechCrunch’s ultimate founder bootcamp of the year by bringing your co-founder or partner for free Book before the BOGO deal expires Register Now Most Popular Anthropic expected to receive high ‘junk’ rating from credit agencies following IPO, FT report says Lucas Ropek Google’s first data center satellite is online and writing poetry Tim Fernholz As search traffic dries up, Reddit announces it’s shifting to a logged-in experience Sarah Perez AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public Amanda Silberling VCs will make billions on Anthropic’s IPO, but Amazon is set to make much (much) more Marina Temkin Billionaire Palmer Luckey isn’t leaving California over the wealth tax Julie Bort Anduril, Qualcomm launch BlueChip, a new kind of US-made laptop Julie Bort Loading the next article Error loading the next article