Ab Wind rejects takeover and raises $400 million, a bet on cloud security valuation in real-time operating era
Ab Wind rejected a takeover offer from Datadog and chose to raise $400 million in a Series C financing round, lifting its market valuation to $3.8 billion.The financial maneuver was not merely a bet on independence, but a clear signal of a shift in technology budgets toward securing AI-powered cloud infrastructure in real-time.
The deal, led by Bismarck Venture Partners with participation from Greelock Partners and Kraft Ventures, came just nine months after the company closed a previous $250 million financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation. Informed sources said Datadog’s attempted takeover almost jeopardized the new funding, which had taken several months to prepare, but the publicly listed company did not offer a price premium above the $3.8 billion investment valuation, sealing the founders’ decision to remain independent.
The firm, focused on operational environment security, was founded four years ago by Amiram Shahar, who sold his previous company Spot.io, a cloud-cost management provider, to NetApp for $450 million. The company employs a protection model centered on real-time operation, detecting threats and instantly patching software vulnerabilities and active attacks in live services, surpassing static scans that face growing challenges as AI-driven attacks accelerate.
The company’s rapid growth figures reflect its reasons for holding a firm negotiating stance against purchase offers.It adds $20 million to $30 million in annual recurring revenue each quarter and is on track to close the current year with revenues near $90 million. This means investors and Datadog valued the company at more than 40 times its projected revenue, a very high multiple but still below the 80-times multiple that Sira Data Security achieved earlier this year. Tomash Tongoz, general partner at Theory Ventures, notes that cybersecurity is poised to become the third major AI software wave that companies will pay for, after code-generation tools and technical support services.
This leap in cloud-operation security valuations has direct implications for CTOs and infrastructure teams in the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant, prompting regional organizations accelerating cloud migration and expanding inference environments to revisit their protection budgets. Rather than relying on periodic security tests or post-code reviews, this shift makes investment in live-monitoring tools for AI-driven cloud computing environments essential to curb automated attacks as soon as they occur, entailing the retraining of security staff and an anticipated rise in competitive operational software license bills.