Upbound is the maintainer of Crossplane, an open-source project released in May 2020 that provides a single declarative API for managing infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors. The company also sells a commercial product, Upbound, which customers can install in their cloud of choice or consume as a SaaS managed by Upbound. The project is hosted under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the team emphasizes building an open-source community to drive a universal cloud control plane. Upbound says major vendors including AWS, Azure, Equinix and IBM are building integrations for Crossplane, and the platform supports integrations with cloud-native tooling such as Elastic, Confluent, Databricks and Snowflake. Management positions Crossplane as a convergence play akin to Kubernetes, and the company is focused on growing both the open-source community and its commercial offering. The company raised capital to accelerate development of the open-source project while expanding its commercial go-to-market. Upbound is developing software to allow customers to run, scale and optimize workloads across multiple Kubernetes clusters, regions and clouds as a single entity. The product is intended to enable policy and rule-based controls—for example cost-based placement and cross-cloud failover—across distributed environments. The company is still working on the product and could be about a year away from release, and plans to use and contribute to open source and open source parts of the product when available. Founder and CEO Bassam Tabbara previously worked on the Rook open source project, giving the team cloud-native and open-source experience. Upbound launched last fall, is Seattle-based, and currently has eight employees while actively recruiting additional engineers. The company emphasizes a distributed/remote-capable workforce and is targeting enterprise demand for hybrid and multi-cloud portability.

Total raised

$69M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Nov 2021