At 16, He Made His First Exit and Is Now Cashing In on the Wiz Gap
TL;DR: Amiram Shachar, who has already completed an exit worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is aiming for the top of cloud cybersecurity and says Wiz’s $32 billion sale to Google proved that “there is no glass ceiling in this market.” His company, Upwind, entered the vacuum created by the deal, which pushed Amazon and Microsoft to look for alternatives to the company their rival acquired. The company is already running at an annual revenue pace of $30 million and is aiming for $100 million. “There is a big barrier to entry, but we will be one of the leading companies,” he says.
In March 2025, the biggest deal in Israeli tech history got underway, the sale of Wiz (Wiz) to Google for $32 billion. It also led its longtime partners, Amazon and Microsoft, to look for other cybersecurity companies that were not painted in the colors of a competing company. Into that vacuum stepped Amiram Shachar’s cloud security company Upwind, making him one of the leading challengers for Wiz’s crown in the cyber field serving the giant technology companies.
Wiz was not only sold to Google. It was sold to its cloud division in order to increase revenue in that area. That was a move that could be seen by competitors as hitting them in their soft underbelly, the fastest-growing product riding the artificial intelligence wave. Amazon, which was one of Wiz’s first partners, certainly did not see the move favorably.
Amiram Shachar (37), personal: Married, father of four, lives in four homes in Tel Aviv and the United States. Professional: Founder and CEO of Upwind, sold his company Spot, which he founded, to NetApp. Another detail: Played midfielder on Beitar Jerusalem’s youth team, windsurfing and wave enthusiast.
So, shortly before Wiz’s multibillion-dollar deal, when it was already clear to everyone that it was about to go through, Amazon signed an upgraded agreement with Upwind, which was then described in the industry as “buying the Israeli company without really buying it.” The reason is a special arrangement in which Amazon’s salespeople market Upwind’s product, in return for a commission similar in size to what is paid for any other Amazon product, a status that until now had been reserved only for an American company called Databricks.
“Amazon interviewed many cloud cybersecurity players, and over the past six months we received feedback that was pivotal for us,” Shachar said in an interview about the deal, which was revealed by Globes. “The world’s largest digital bank, the world’s largest recycling company, the world’s largest car agency, all of them chose us and told Amazon about it. I think that gave them a lot of indications that there is a startup growing here.”
Microsoft, which is in a significant disadvantage relative to Google in the AI market, did not make dramatic moves on the issue, but Globes has learned that recently its salespeople have been marketing Upwind’s products inside the cloud store of the software giant. If these agreements continue, they could propel the company from a small and insignificant competitor to Wiz into one that is benefiting from the opportunity created by the giant acquisition market.
Upwind is already visible in the numbers. Until last year, it was a company generating more than $20 million a year. Today it stands at an annual recurring revenue, ARR, pace of $30 million, and if its plans to become an alternative to Wiz are realized, it expects to end the year at a pace of $100 million.
How do you compete in a market where Wiz is so dominant? For most of the years you were a small company generating perhaps a few million dollars. Who would notice you?
“Wiz proved that there is no glass ceiling in cloud security, and their acquisition for such an amount is excellent validation for any other company active in the market. When a company is acquired, good things happen, like their connection with Google’s Gemini. But there is also an innovation curve, and as a private company I can only hope our curve will be faster than other companies’.”
“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told his employees during a difficult period, instead of dealing with our competitors, let’s focus only on customers. Our competitors are not going to pay us money anyway.”
Shachar admits that raising money for a company operating in Wiz’s field is not simple. “There were dozens of entrepreneurs I know who wanted to do cloud security and told themselves, there’s no chance we are entering this field where Wiz is so good, we don’t want to get burned. But we simply kept going, built the right team, raised from good funds, and today I can say there is already a very big barrier to entry in this market, and when I look at the coming years, there is no doubt that we will be one of the three leading companies in the world in the market.”
“A force of nature grown out of hardship”: What the first investor in Assaf Rappaport sees in Shachar
“In many meetings I know within three minutes whether I want to invest or not, and in Shachar’s case I knew immediately that I was interested,” says Gili Raanan, founder of Cyberstarts, about the investment in Amiram Shachar’s Upwind. “I often encounter a different kind of person: the smartest kid in the class, who finished a degree at 15 and by the time of the Talpiot program had already completed a doctorate. That is not the story here, it is the story of an entrepreneur who built himself with his own hands, a person I call a ‘force of nature’, an excellent technologist who grew out of hardship, and although he is not a straight line by any measure, he built an amazing company with very little guidance.”
Raanan is best known as the first investor in Wiz. The venture capital fund he manages, which was founded for early investments in cyber companies, recently wrote a $1.3 billion check on an investment of more than $6 million in Assaf Rappaport’s company in 2020. In addition, he invested in companies such as Cyera, valued at $6 billion, and Island, valued at $5 billion, alongside companies that were less successful, such as Savi Security or TrustedOps.
Are there lessons you took from the Wiz investment, such as not selling part of the shares too early?
Raanan: “It taught me that every journey is different and that if you work properly, hard, effectively, choose the right market, choose the right problem, build an excellent team, there is no glass ceiling, and I think that is the lesson. But I think what Wiz proved to every entrepreneur in Israel is that they are simply capable. I am sure there are now many more entrepreneurs who have nothing, maybe not even an idea, but they are already convinced they will succeed more than Wiz, and that is great.”
How do you deal with the criticism that you invested in companies that are essentially competing with one another, Upwind, Wiz, maybe even Cyera?
“Every company here is very different in the way it develops. I am the kind of investor who wants to invest in amazing people even if they do not have an idea, and even if they have a mediocre idea. You are at the starting point, there is a person, you decide to be their partner and they decide to be your partner, and you set out on the road. Where the company develops depends on where the road takes us.”
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“I like hearing failure stories”
There was no deliberate plan here to go head to head with Wiz. In the past the two companies operated in slightly different areas. Wiz protected the connection of external applications to the corporate cloud, while Upwind focused on the real-time field, which allows developers and security managers to see in real time problems that arise during development or the launch of a product. The overlap with Wiz happened over time as part of the evolution of the cybersecurity industry.
“As an entrepreneur you are told, work on a very, very focused field and expand from there, but then you discover that when you bring one product, the real-time layer, the customer says, bring me additional adjacent products, such as cloud application protection or API protection, and it is simply logical that he gets as much as possible in one place,” Shachar explains. “We learned this from our customers, every meeting room in the office is named after a different customer, each of them has a story.”
Upwind is not alone on the field. Companies such as Echo or the Israeli company Sweet, operating in the world of cloud security, are also seeing growing demand for their services after Wiz’s exit. But it appears that investors, among them Bessemer and Picture, and cyber leaders such as Dan Amiga, Rakesh Loonkar and Mickey Boodaei, are putting their chips on Upwind.
In January, they led a $250 million investment in the company, at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Did your appetite to expand create friction with other cybersecurity companies, such as Wiz and Cyera, also in the portfolio of your investors, for example Gili Raanan of Cyberstarts?
“In our market, whoever did not respond in that way was out of the game. Look at companies like Aqua, Orca, Sysdig, Lacework, Snyk and Checkmarx. There were many companies that specialized in one solution and decided not to expand their product suite, and then Palo Alto Networks and Wiz arrived and created a new status quo, one that customers expected. When I build something new, I like hearing not only success stories, but also failure stories. Lacework was worth $8 billion and it simply fell apart. I consulted with people who knew the company to understand what happened there, so I would not have to understand it when it was already too late.”
And then there was a conflict of interest, such as the fact that Gili Raanan sits on the boards of Upwind and Wiz, two competing companies.
“This is not a wrestling ring where people grapple and only one comes out a winner. In our market there is enough room for several players and you can succeed together. Look למשל at Fortinet, which is already worth $90 billion and grew alongside Palo Alto, which is trading at a valuation of about $200 billion. But it is also important to say that at the time Gili Raanan met us, each of us was at a different point, and even today the companies are at different stages, so the help he gives us is unique to each company.”
Life in hardship and the dream that was broken
In fact, Shachar did not need any of this. He could already have retired after selling his startup Spot in 2020, a company that reduced the cost of cloud services consumption, for about $450 million to the American software company NetApp. But the 37-year-old entrepreneur, who moves between four homes in the United States and Israel, remained hungry.
In his case, it is a hunger that is the result of his life story. Shachar was born in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood, and moved with his family to Katamon, but spent most of his childhood in Gilo Bet, studying in religious schools. His father was not around for as long as he can remember, and his mother raised him and his older sister alone.
“The three of us were against the world, and my mother tried to give everything she had. She worked hard, was a nurse in a hospital and did double shifts, also in private institutions, just so I could buy my first computer,” he recalls. “I think about how complex that survival war was. When life does not give you the cards from the start, you have to fight hard to get to a point where you can even begin from an equal place, and my mother worked hard so her children would have cards.”
Shachar often found himself alone at home. “I had a lot of time to deal with the computer, to take it apart and put it back together,” he says. “We took those hard moments and turned them into adrenaline, into a place where we solve problems, we invested our free time in creating and learning and being curious, and that is perhaps the greatest gift I received.”
His childhood dream was to build a career as a soccer player at Beitar Jerusalem, and for a period he even played as a midfielder on the youth team, but he could not participate in games on Saturdays in the religious environment in which he grew up. “That put an end to the soccer career,” he says. “Until 11th grade I wore a kippah, and even today I am a person of faith. I think the great physicists said that anyone who knows a little physics does not believe in God, but anyone who understands physics deeply believes very much in God.”
At the age of 16, Shachar went to work to support the family. “My reality as a child revolved around the question of how I help my mother pay rent and bills, and if I want to fulfill my dreams, I need to go to work,” he says. “I finished my matriculation exams quickly, so I no longer needed to go to school, which left me time.”
In his first job, as a shift manager at a shoe store in a Jerusalem mall, he made his first exit. Shachar noticed a recurring problem, customers could not find what they wanted in the store, ordered a pair of shoes from another store, and were required to sign to commit that they would come to pick them up. On his home computer he developed a system for inventory management and digital signature, and before his draft into the army, when he announced he was leaving, he was asked to sell the software to the chain.
The solution that made him a millionaire
When it was time for him to enlist, Shachar, who had already completed five-unit matriculation in computers and mathematics in 10th grade, caught the eye of the army placement officers and was assigned to the Mamram course, far from the glamorous technology units of 8200 and 81. He was assigned to the army’s DevOps team, which is responsible for the computing infrastructure powering a series of critical systems.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science through evening studies at The College of Management while serving, and after being discharged he became head of software infrastructure at the online advertising company Ybrant. Shachar managed Ybrant’s move to Amazon’s public cloud.
“We tried to lift a server, but it turned out to be much more expensive than I thought. If I thought I was going to spend $20,000, I got a bill for $300,000,” he says. “So for my final project in school I turned to the question, how do I lower the costs and the existing solutions and create a system that knows exactly what you are spending money on now.”
Shachar found a major reduction in Amazon cloud services costs through hosting on servers that Amazon defines as surplus, spot servers. Amazon offers a significant discount on these servers, and there is also a risk, they can be taken away with a few days’ notice. But that solution made him a millionaire.
But turning the idea into a company was not a walk in the park. “Everyone I suggested joining was pretty skeptical. They told me, we’re in 2014, the idea you are thinking about already exists, and it is impossible to reduce Amazon’s costs, unless you are Amazon,” he recalls. “Venture capital investors told us that Amazon would kill this idea quickly, and there were endless other excuses. And I was young, 24 or 25, after the army, telling myself, maybe they are right?”
Despite that, Shachar did not let the skepticism discourage him. “I kept talking to customers, and also to Amazon, and I understood there was something interesting here. I set myself a goal that summer, if by September I do not bring in three customers, I will abandon the idea and move on, and then, boom. By September we already had eight customers.”
The dam broke only when Eli Wortman, from Pico, and Tamir Carmi, from IronSource, wrote the first check for $50,000. Only when Intel Capital agreed to lead a funding round in 2017 was Upwind able to raise more than $50 million.
“In the end we used less than $6 million throughout that period, we managed to generate cash flow without scaling headcount fast enough, and that is how we made the company profitable.”
“I envied entrepreneurs at the beginning of the journey”
Four years passed and then Spot received the acquisition offer from NetApp. “In the delivery room, during the birth of my eldest daughter, I still found myself negotiating a $100 million private equity round, and a few days later, while I was driving to buy diapers, I got a phone call from a vice president at NetApp asking if we were interested in entering sale negotiations,” Shachar recounts. “I told him we had decided to go a different way and raise money. When you say something like that to a company that wants to buy you, it acts as a catalyst, and after three weeks we had an offer in hand.”
The deal was signed days before the first COVID lockdown in Israel and the United States. “I found myself vice president of about 700 people all at once, responsible for a lot of things happening in that company, all this while I had never even visited its offices,” says Shachar. “The company is doing great and growing, and I am also coming with motivation to develop Spot inside the company for many more years, but suddenly another feeling begins to creep in: I look at startup entrepreneurs and say to myself, they do not understand what they have in their hands.
“You work in a large system, it is much harder for you to make decisions, move, and make things happen. There is much more politics, and when I talk to an entrepreneur on Zoom, I feel he would like to be in my place, someone who sold his company, but does not understand that I want to be in his place.”
Thus, a little more than two years after the big exit, Shachar was already looking for the next thing, and brought in Gili Raanan, the first investor in Wiz. “All the investors gave me a blank check to build the next thing, but the meeting with Gili changed everything, five minutes into the meeting he said to me, I cannot explain why, but we will probably start working together,” says Shachar. “I went back to the investors and told them we were changing the cap table structure in the company.”
Joining Shachar were also the basketball players Omri Casspi and Steph Curry, who had once played together on the same NBA team. Shachar, who then lived in San Francisco and was a devoted fan of their team, Golden State, got a tour of the locker room through a friend, where he met Casspi. “We exchanged a few words and became good friends, and it got to the point where we would go eat together after every game.”
Steph Curry, NBA player. He and Omri Casspi were among the first investors in Upwind.
Shachar connected with the object of his admiration, while Casspi, who had already begun thinking about the next stage of his life as a venture capital investor, eagerly absorbed Shachar’s startup stories and promised him that he would invest in the next startup he founded. He brought Curry with him and later the two became early investors in Upwind. Casspi booked a nice paper gain on the investment, which allowed him to raise his second fund, Swish.
Shachar and his son. “Money? I teach the children to realize themselves through doing”
Looking back, what do successful cyber entrepreneurs, who did not come from the same background as you, still not know about life, that you understood long ago?
“We once sat a few officers down for a beer and told each other our life stories. Then it dawned on us that none of us had a father. We suddenly understood how life circumstances like these define lines in your character, leadership, initiative, responsibility. To this day, when I interview people for a job, I am always curious to go back and see what they bring to the table, what built them, what the family mosaic is, and above all what they want to prove.”
Today you are a father of four, after a not insignificant exit, you have several beautiful homes around the world, what kind of parenting do you give your children? Do you feel you need to compensate them for what you went through?
“I had an excellent math teacher named Menucha. We asked her, why are you not in high tech, where you could earn more? She answered, if I work in high tech maybe I will have more money in life, but with more money I will not buy more clothes or eat more than I eat every day. That sentence helped me deal with the exit. Suddenly when you are in a reality where you have money, you understand that your self-fulfillment comes through doing and creating. There is a limit to how many clothes you can buy, or how many meals you can eat, that is what I try to pass on to my children.”