Upwind Chief Security Officer (CSO): Rinki Sethi

What the company sells

Upwind sells security for cloud workloads, APIs and agents, combining their context with runtime intelligence to identify critical risks and catch new attacks in real time. Upwind describes itself as a runtime security platform that enables security professionals to navigate toward the root cause of security issues. Upwind states a mission to give security teams and AI agents what they need to remediate risks and respond to threats as they occur. Security teams use Upwind to detect, prioritize and respond to real risks. Upwind was founded by the team behind Spot.io, a cloud infrastructure optimization company acquired by NetApp.

Upwind provides a live map of the environment showing which workloads and agents are running, who owns them, what they communicate with and what data they can reach. Upwind connects workload runtime signals and cloud activities to spot deviations in cloud and AI activity as they occur. Upwind offers specialized AI agents that investigate threats, provide red team validation and offer remediation. By combining runtime intelligence with cloud workload, API and agent context, Upwind focuses teams on critical risks, reachable exposures, remediation and real-time threat detection.

For cloud posture, Upwind inventories all cloud resources, services and technologies across environments. Upwind maps assets, attributes, ownership and relationships into a single view. Upwind analyzes how risks relate and propagate across interconnected assets. Upwind pushes prioritized findings into CI/CD, alerting, chat and ticketing systems.

Upwind's Agentic Pack combines runtime-powered security context with specialized AI agents that investigate, validate and drive remediation across the environment. Choppy unifies Upwind's security context, specialized AI agents and workflows into one conversational control plane. Red safely tests the environment the way an adversary would, proving which risks are reachable in production. Upwind analyzes an entire finding set together to find the few hotspots where a single change fixes thousands of issues at once. Green surfaces the handful of changes that eliminate the most risk, ranked by what they remove. Upwind delivers implementation-ready changes across code, IaC, packages, images and cloud configuration as Pull Requests.

Upwind scans every layer of cloud infrastructure to secure AI applications from code to runtime. Upwind states that users can see a complete AI inventory, improve AI posture and respond to AI threats in realtime. Upwind maps all AI resources in cloud providers, AI platforms, active workloads and endpoint devices. Upwind discovers unsanctioned models, tools and third-party AI services adopted outside approved governance. Upwind produces a full bill of materials for the models, datasets, packages and dependencies behind every AI application. Upwind shows which sensitive data AI systems can reach and which identities and permissions they inherit. Upwind inspects agents, their tools, MCP connections and instructions for risky configurations and prompt injection paths. Upwind assesses AI configurations continuously against benchmarks and regulatory frameworks. Upwind monitors the AI stack for prompt injection, data exfiltration and agent misuse. Upwind runs continuous offensive testing for every model, agent and MCP server that an organization exposes.

Upwind auto-discovers managed, unmanaged and shadow APIs across clouds and containers. Upwind protects REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP and legacy protocols with unified controls. Upwind identifies PII, PHI, PCI and secrets flowing through APIs. Upwind spots abuse patterns such as brute force, lateral movement and token misuse.

Upwind's secret scanning detects and blocks API keys, tokens and hardcoded passwords. Upwind analyzes configuration files like Terraform and CloudFormation for critical security flaws before they are deployed. Upwind's Admission Controller enforces granular policies to stop insecure workloads from starting. Upwind prevents privileged containers, root access and unverified images from running. Upwind validates image signatures and verifies provenance at the door, so that the container trying to run is the artifact the team built and verified. Upwind correlates build-time alerts with live runtime data to show which vulnerable packages are loaded, running and exploitable. When a runtime threat is detected, Upwind traces it back through the build pipeline to identify the specific repo, commit and developer owner.^{[1][3][5][6][7][8][9][10]}

Categories

• Cloud-native application protection (CNAPP) (primary category)
• Cloud security posture management
• Cloud detection and response
• API security
• Compare Upwind with companies in the same categoryside by side

Headquarters

Not established from our sources

Founded

2022^[2][4]

Ownership

Privately held^[4][11]

CISO on record

Rinki Sethi, Chief Security Officer (CSO) (appointment announced in the week of June 9, 2025)

Website

upwind.io

Products and services

Product names as the company writes them; what each does, in our words, from the company's own product pages. Never how well it does it.

• Cloud Security^[1]

  A CNAPP that combines posture, workload and runtime signals to find and prioritize cloud risks.

• AI Security^[8]

  Monitors AI workloads and agents within the cloud environment to identify risky configurations and behaviour.

• Agentic Security^[1][7]

  Watches autonomous AI agents and their skills or MCP connections for malicious or high-risk activity.

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)^[1]

  Checks cloud account and resource configuration against security policy on an ongoing basis.

• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM)^[1]

  Analyses identity permissions across cloud platforms to reduce excess access.

• Cloud Detection & Response (CDR)^[1]

  Correlates runtime signals and cloud activity logs to detect and respond to threats as they occur.

Competitors and alternatives

The other companies on our record filed under the same categories, category by category: first those that lead with that category and share more of Upwind's categories, then alphabetical. A list from the record, never a ranking.

• On cloud-native application protection (cnapp), Upwind competes with Lacework, Sweet Security, Sysdig, Cyscale, Orca Security, RAD Security, Uptycs, Wiz, Aqua Security, Plerion and 12 more.

• On cloud security posture management, Upwind competes with Lacework, Sysdig, Cyscale, RAD Security, Intruder, SAIC and Sonrai.

• On cloud detection and response, Upwind competes with Miggo, Mitiga, Skyhawk Security, Stream.Security, Lacework, Sweet Security, Sysdig, Orca Security, Uptycs, Wiz and 4 more.

• On api security, Upwind competes with Data Theorem, 42Crunch, Cequence Security, Escape, Levo.ai, Pynt, Salt Security, Traceable AI, Wallarm, Sweet Security and 15 more.

What review platforms show

The headline rating and review count each platform showed in public search results on the day we looked, with the link. We do not read or reproduce the reviews, and a rating is the platform's, not ours.

• G2 · no rating shown · 10 reviews^[11]seen November 10, 2026

References

Every fact above cites one of these by number. Tier A is the company itself, a regulator or a filing; tier B is trade or business press.

1. [1]upwind.ioUpwind · upwind.io · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
2. [2]NewsroomUpwind · upwind.io · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
3. [3]Upwind Security: Cloud & AI Security for the Realtime EraUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
4. [4]About - UpwindUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
5. [5]Upwind Case Studies: Real-World Cloud Security Success StoriesUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
6. [6]Run - UpwindUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
7. [7]Agentic Security - UpwindUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
8. [8]AI Security Platform - UpwindUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
9. [9]Runtime API Security: Discover and Protect APIs in Real TimeUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
10. [10]Build - UpwindUpwind · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A: the company, a regulator or a filing
11. [11]Upwind Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & FeaturesG2 · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier C

Last verified November 5, 2026. Our code found the quoted passage behind each fact on its source page when the fact was recorded, and re-checks every record against its sources each month.

Recorded November 5, 2026, expanded November 10, 2026 from the references above.

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