Upwind Acquires Aegis, Builds AI Security Labs to Research Emerging Cyber Threats

New York, United States, September 23rd, 2026, FinanceWire

The security implications of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence are becoming a growing focus for cybersecurity companies, particularly as AI agents and AI-powered workflows gain broader capabilities. Upwind is taking a more direct approach to the emerging threat landscape with 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 research and engineering team focused on AI security. The labs will work on areas including scanning, attack detection and capabilities designed to address security risks generated by AI tools and frontier models.

For Upwind, the acquisition adds Aegis's technology and development work to an existing runtime platform focused on cloud and AI environments.

From Strategic Partnership to Acquisition

The transaction followed several months of collaboration between the two companies. Aegis's founders initially approached Upwind about a strategic partnership and investment while developing their technology.

That relationship eventually led to an acquisition, bringing the Aegis team into Upwind and providing the foundation for the new AI Security Labs.

Limor and Ankonina founded Aegis after beginning their careers together as alumni of 8200, an intelligence unit focused on offensive cybersecurity. Their professional relationship included working together in different roles, including a commander-subordinate relationship, before eventually becoming peers.

At Aegis, the founders concentrated on security challenges surrounding AI infrastructure. The startup's work included protection against sophisticated AI-generated attacks, including autonomous exploitation pipelines and large-scale credential harvesting.

The technology is now being incorporated into Upwind's broader cloud and AI security efforts.

“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.”

Targeting the AI Attack Surface

One of the central areas for the new labs will be the infrastructure surrounding AI agents. These systems can interact with applications, access information and execute tasks. Skills and plugins can extend their functionality, but they can also add new components that require security controls.

Upwind AI Security Labs will research these emerging risks and develop capabilities intended to identify and address them.

The company also highlighted secret scanning as a key area of focus. Upwind pointed to recent industry findings involving compromised API keys and session tokens being harvested at scale for malicious campaigns. The labs will focus on scanning secrets both in transit and at rest to help prevent unauthorized access across cloud and AI environments.

The focus builds directly on the problem Aegis was created to address.

“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.”

Saar Ankonina, Aegis's other co-founder, said the integration will provide an opportunity to expand the technology through Upwind's platform.

“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.”

Upwind Plans to Expand the Team

The labs are starting with 12 developers and researchers from Aegis and Upwind. That number is expected to increase to approximately 25 within the next three months, with the company potentially expanding the group to 35 people as the initiative develops.

The hiring and team expansion are intended to give Upwind greater capacity to research new AI security problems while accelerating development of capabilities based on that work.

“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.”

Connecting Research with Product Development

The new labs are also designed around a broader challenge facing the cybersecurity industry: converting research into usable defenses quickly enough to keep pace with new attack techniques.

Upwind says the combination of Aegis's technology, its team, and Upwind's existing platform is intended to shorten the path between identifying emerging AI security risks and developing capabilities to address them.

“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.”

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