Upwind, the Israeli cloud security company, said on September 23, 2026 that it had acquired Aegis, an Israeli startup working on security for AI agents, and was launching Upwind AI Security Labs around the Aegis team. Axios first reported the deal.
Upwind did not disclose the price. CTech reported that the deal was paid in stock and valued at tens of millions of dollars, and Ynetnews said Globes had cited market estimates of about $30 million.
Aegis co-founders Omri Limor and Saar Ankonina will lead the new lab, which starts with 12 developers and researchers from both companies. Upwind said it expects the group to reach about 25 people within three months and possibly 35 later.
What Aegis built
CTech reported that Aegis was nine months old when it was acquired, and Ynetnews said it was founded in early 2026 and came out of stealth with the deal. Its work focused on the infrastructure around AI agents, including the skills and plugins that extend what agents can do, and on defending against AI-driven attacks such as automated exploitation and large-scale credential harvesting.
Limor said the founders built Aegis to address what they saw as a missing security layer around AI agents, skills and plugins. Ankonina said putting the technology directly into Upwind's platform gave it an immediate path to scale.
No outside funding for Aegis has been reported. Its founders had first approached Upwind about a strategic partnership and an investment while they were still developing the product, and the two companies worked together for several months before Upwind decided to buy it.
“AI security is developing extremely quickly, and by acquiring Aegis and bringing Omri and Saar on board, we are building a team that can move just as quickly.”
The founders
Limor and Ankonina both served in Unit 8200, the Israeli military intelligence unit, where they began their careers in offensive cyber operations. At one point one of them commanded the other. Ynetnews reported that they later worked at Israeli cybersecurity companies before starting Aegis.
What the new lab will do
Upwind AI Security Labs will research attacks involving AI agents, tools and frontier models and build detection and scanning features for Upwind's runtime security platform. Upwind singled out secret scanning as a priority: finding exposed API keys and session tokens, both in transit and at rest, which attackers have been harvesting at scale.
Upwind chief executive Amiram Shachar said AI security was moving very fast and that the acquisition gave the company a team that could keep up. He said the goal was to shorten the time between research and working security features.
Ynetnews put the deal in the context of a September threat intelligence report from Anthropic, which found that criminals and suspected state-backed groups were using AI to automate reconnaissance, exploitation and the handling of stolen data. In one case in the report, an operator downloaded 1.8 million Android apps and scanned them for exposed credentials and other secrets.
Upwind's recent growth
Upwind was founded in 2022 by Shachar and colleagues from Spot.io, the cloud software company NetApp bought for $450 million in 2020. Its software analyses threats in cloud environments in real time.
The Aegis deal came weeks after Upwind raised $300 million at a valuation of about $3.8 billion, more than double the $1.5 billion valuation of its $250 million round in January, according to CTech. The company has raised more than $700 million in total from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, TCV, Cyberstarts, Greylock, Craft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
Upwind also recently hired Omer Grossman, a former commander of the Israeli military's Mamram computing unit and a former CyberArk executive, as chief business officer.
Cloud security companies have been expanding into protecting AI systems as businesses deploy agents that can access data and act inside their software. Upwind is using part of its new funding to buy a team rather than build that work from scratch.
