NBA Superstar Steph Curry Joins Investors In Israeli Cyber Startup

American basketball superstar Steph Curry is among the investors in a $50 million funding round that has just been raised by an Israeli cybersecurity startup.

UpWind Security develops a security platform that protects cloud infrastructure in real time, and is already working with dozens of Fortune 500 companies.

The funding was raised by Sheva, a VC fund established by Israeli former basketball player Omri Casspi, and Penny Jar, a VC fund backed by Curry and other investors. 

UpWind, which is based in Tel Aviv, has raised a total of $80 million in the 11 months since its inception, and is now valued at $300 million. It will use the funds to increase their workforce, which currently stands a 70, within a year. 

This isn’t the first time an NBA player has invested in an Israeli startup. Last year, basketball superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo invested an undisclosed sum in Tel Aviv-based Antidote Health, which provides affordable healthcare online. 

UpWind was founded by Amiram Shachar, who previously founded Spot.io, a cloud service and management optimization company. In 2020, Spot was sold to American data storage company NetApp for $450 million.

“In the past year, we worked with hundreds of CISOs and security engineers, to get a mile-deep understanding of their biggest security challenges and priorities,” said Shachar.

“Through this process, we discovered major hurdles facing security teams and understood that the right, most complete way to solve them is at runtime,” he said.

“Upwind is shifting the paradigm of cloud security and redefining CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform) with runtime insights.”