The cloud promised agility. AI promised efficiency. What neither promised was an easy answer to the security challenges that would follow. As organizations race to adopt cloud-native infrastructure and AI-driven workflows, the threat landscape has grown wider, faster, and harder to contain. For the security leaders navigating this every day, the most useful conversations are rarely the ones happening on a conference stage.
That was the premise behind the Upwind CISO Sunset Circle, hosted by Upwind in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners andYourStory on April 24, 2026, at Ti Amo, the rooftop poolside at Conrad Bengaluru. The invite-only gathering brought together CISOs, heads of security, and cloud and platform engineering leaders for candid, peer-level dialogue on securing cloud- and AI-driven organizations.
Setting the tone
The evening was hosted by Rinki Sethi, Chief Security and Strategy Officer at Upwind, who opened with a brief keynote drawing on her 25 years in cybersecurity across various firms and regions before joining Upwind. She also introduced Lockstep Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused fund she co-founded with Lucas Moody, CISO at Alteryx, which has made 13 investments globally and runs a community of around 500 security practitioners.
Her message for the evening was clear: "CISOs and security leaders work really hard, and they're the ones who fuel the entire ecosystem. It's so important that we really invest in the community, and that means people walk away saying, ‘I had this amazing conversation, I met this incredible person"
The conversations that defined the evening
The themes that surfaced across the room were consistent: AI security, data sovereignty, and the complexity of securing cloud-native environments.
Hari Krishna, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at HCL Software, pointed to data sovereignty as a defining challenge, especially given geopolitical tensions and the vulnerability of data centers in conflict regions. Harsh Sahu, Co-founder and CTO of Matters.ai, noted that as AI models drive exponential data movement across enterprises, perimeter security tools alone are no longer adequate. Sanskar, Product Security Engineer at Slice, raised concerns about the lack of trust boundaries around AI model usage, including supply chain risks from open-source models. Rashid Firoz, who leads security at Cred, underlined the rising threat of AI-based attacks and the value of peer gatherings in surfacing shared solutions.
Lucas Moody, Founding GP at Lockstep Ventures, captured the spirit of the evening well: intimate settings, he noted, allow security practitioners to speak honestly in ways that larger conferences rarely permit.
Building community, one gathering at a time
For Upwind and Bessemer Venture Partners, the Bengaluru Sunset Circle was more than an event. It was a deliberate investment in a security leadership community that is growing in influence and increasingly global in its challenges. If the conversations that night were any indication, there is no shortage of things worth talking about.
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