The rapid development of artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities for businesses while also changing the nature of cybersecurity threats. Upwind is expanding its focus on that evolving landscape through the acquisition of AI security startup Aegis and the launch of Upwind AI Security Labs, as first reported by Axios.
The new initiative will bring Aegis co-founders Omri Limor and Saar Ankonina into Upwind, where they will lead a growing group of developers and researchers focused on AI security. The labs will concentrate on areas including scanning, attack detection and capabilities designed to address attacks generated by AI tools and frontier models.
The acquisition also brings Aegis’s technology into Upwind’s existing runtime platform, connecting the startup’s AI security work with the company’s broader focus on securing cloud and AI environments.
An AI Security Startup Moves Into Upwind
Aegis was founded by Limor and Ankonina, who began their careers together as members of 8200, an intelligence unit focused on offensive cybersecurity. The two later worked in a commander-subordinate relationship before eventually becoming peers, and they went on to launch Aegis after leaving the unit.
The startup was created around security challenges emerging in AI infrastructure, with its work focused on threats including autonomous exploitation pipelines and large-scale credential harvesting. According to Upwind, these AI-generated attack methods can collapse traditional skill gaps by making sophisticated cyber activity more accessible.
Aegis initially approached Upwind about a strategic partnership and investment while developing its product. After several months of working together, the companies moved toward an acquisition that brought the Aegis team and technology into Upwind and provided the foundation for AI Security Labs.
“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,” said Amiram Shachar, CEO and Co-Founder at Upwind. “The Aegis team brings a deep understanding of the challenges around securing agents, skills, and plugins, and by combining that expertise with Upwind’s existing platform, we can move from research to real-world security capabilities much faster.”
Securing Agents, Skills and Plugins
The new labs will focus on the security implications of increasingly capable AI systems, including the infrastructure surrounding AI agents and the skills and plugins that extend their functionality. Agents can interact with applications, access information and execute tasks, while those additional components introduce more elements that need to be protected.
Upwind says AI Security Labs will research these emerging risks while developing capabilities intended to identify and address them. The initiative will also place a significant focus on secret scanning, both in transit and at rest, following industry findings involving compromised API keys and session tokens being harvested at scale for malicious campaigns.
The emphasis on AI agents and their supporting infrastructure is closely aligned with the problem Aegis was originally created to solve. “We initially built Aegis as a startup to tackle the missing security layer around AI agents, skills and plugins,” said Omri Limor, Co-Founder of Aegis. “After spending several months working together with Upwind, it became clear that joining forces through an acquisition and establishing AI Security Labs inside Upwind would allow us to move much faster and combine our technology with the capabilities Upwind has already built.”
Ankonina said the integration with Upwind will give Aegis’s technology a direct route to broader deployment. “Integrating our technology directly into Upwind’s platform gives us an immediate path to scale,” added Saar Ankonina, Co-Founder of Aegis. “The establishment of AI Security Labs provides the ideal environment to accelerate research and protect enterprise AI workflows.”
A Growing Research Operation
AI Security Labs is launching with 12 developers and researchers drawn from Aegis and Upwind, but the company expects that figure to increase significantly. Upwind plans for the team to reach approximately 25 people within the next three months, with the potential to grow to 35 as the initiative develops.
The planned expansion reflects the company’s emphasis on building research and engineering capacity around emerging AI security problems. Rather than treating the acquisition solely as a technology transaction, Upwind is using the Aegis team as the starting point for a larger internal capability.
“We built AI Security Labs on the foundation of the Aegis acquisition with the ambition to create a significant research and engineering capability within Upwind,” said Shachar. “We expect the team to grow from 12 people today to 25 and potentially 35 in the coming months, allowing us to expand our research and accelerate the development of new AI security capabilities.”
Turning Emerging Risks Into Defenses
The broader objective is to reduce the time between discovering new AI security risks and developing practical capabilities to address them. Upwind says the labs will combine Aegis’s technology and research with its existing platform and market strategy to accelerate that process.
“As AI transforms both the threat landscape and the speed of modern cyber operations, this is the ideal moment to build, innovate, and lead in cloud and AI security,” added Shachar. “With AI Security Labs, Upwind is reinforcing its mission to protect modern enterprise infrastructure and ensure organizations can safely embrace the next era of AI innovation.”
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.