Four-time NBA champion and perennial all-star Stephen Curry is among the new investors in Israeli cybersecurity startup Upwind in a round that values the company at $300 million.
The year-old cloud security firm raised $50 million in the round, which was led by Greylock Partners, Cyberstarts and Leaders Fund, Upwind said in a statement to Bloomberg on Tuesday. Curry’s Penny Jar Capital and a fund backed by his former Golden State Warriors teammate, Israeli-born Omri Casspi, also participated, according to the statement.
Upwind said it works with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and has raised $80 million overall to develop a platform that detects and responds to threats to cloud infrastructure. It has 70 employees with offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. The new funding will be used to more than double the number of staff within a year, Chief Executive Officer Amiram Shachar said in an interview.
Shachar sold his previous startup Spot.io to NetApp Inc. in 2020 for $450 million. Eight former Spot.io executives, who also served alongside Shachar in the Israel Defense Forces IT unit that oversaw the military’s transition to the cloud, work at Upwind, he said.
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In the US, a number of high-profile athletes have been investing in different areas of sport. Eli Manning, a two-time Super Bowl quarterback formerly of the National Football League’s New York Giants, last year clinched his first deal as a partner at investment firm Brand Velocity Group, which acquired a majority stake in youth league apparel company Score Sports.
