SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Upbound, the cloud management platform company behind the popular open source Crossplane project, today announced that it raised $60M in new funding. The new funding includes a Series B round led by Altimeter Capital with participation from GV, Intel Capital, and Telstra Ventures. The funding follows 10x quarter-over-quarter recurring revenue growth fueled by Crossplane adoption and enterprise demand for Upbound’s product offering. Upbound will use the funding to broaden its worldwide go-to-market efforts, accelerate product development, and expand its services and support offerings. To-date, Upbound has raised $69 million.
“We believe that Upbound is distinctly positioned to be the convergence point for cloud infrastructure,” said Ram Woo, partner at Altimeter Capital. “The Crossplane project they invented builds on the momentum of the cloud-native community, and the company's remarkable growth is a testament to the Kubernetes-first approach desired by platform engineers. We have been watching Upbound for a while and are excited to partner with Bassam and team.”
With the rise of Kubernetes and the cloud-native movement, enterprise infrastructure is undergoing a wave of modernization not seen since the dawn of cloud computing. Legacy Infrastructure-as-Code tooling is no longer adequate to manage multiple cloud vendor environments, deploy applications into different clouds, and accelerate the application development cycle. Upbound created Crossplane in 2018 to offer the cloud-native community a Universal Control Plane for this new era of cloud computing. For the first time, the industry has rallied around a consistent, declarative, and vendor-neutral API for the cloud.
Upbound’s Universal Cloud Platform makes it easy for enterprises to transform their internal operations into a comprehensive cloud platform, simplifying infrastructure management and empowering developers with self-service capabilities. In an era where cloud computing is heading towards more horizontal integration, enterprises can truly achieve a single point of control for all their teams, applications, workloads and vendors. Infrastructure managed via Upbound adheres to an organization's policy guardrails and is continuously reconciled, simplifying Day 2 operations, eliminating configuration drift entirely, and enabling a much higher degree of automation than was previously possible.
“We’re going all-in on the Universal Control Plane approach Upbound is bringing to market,” said Sidarta Oliveira, Director of Infrastructure & Cloud at Grupo Boticário. “Thanks to Upbound, we’re rapidly transforming our approach to infrastructure management and application development and are able to bring the same cloud native practices and tooling to both our operator and developer teams.”
Founded by open source industry veteran and Rook co-creator Bassam Tabbara in 2017, Upbound is quickly being recognized by leading enterprises around the world that have adopted Kubernetes. Enterprise customers are integrating Upbound into their existing software delivery pipelines enabling “GitOps for everything” workflows. Crossplane and Upbound work out of the box with thousands of tools and products in the cloud native ecosystem. In addition, cloud and Infrastructure vendors are building specific integrations into Crossplane.
“We are witnessing a convergence effect on Crossplane as a Universal Control Plane for the cloud that is built on top of Kubernetes and solid cloud native abstractions,” said Chris Aniszcyk, CTO at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “Upbound has done a phenomenal job stewarding the project by building a diverse open community around Crossplane. The CNCF is thrilled to cultivate and support the Crossplane project in its next evolution of growth."
“We started Upbound four years ago realizing the industry was at a pivotal moment, and that customers more than ever wanted to consume services and deploy abstractions across multiple vendors,” said Upbound Founder and CEO Bassam Tabbara. “We see platform engineering teams everywhere building their own internal modern day Heroku. Today’s funding announcement ensures we continue to help them on their journey with innovative products and services.”
The company recently announced a fully self-hosted, self-managed version of its Universal Cloud Platform with strict security requirements in response to customer demand. Upbound also continues to invest in the open source Crossplane community. The company recently donated a code generation project to ensure operators using legacy Infrastructure-as-Code tooling can easily switch over to a modern control plane architecture, as Upbound continues to be at the forefront of innovation in the space.
About Upbound
Created in 2017, Upbound is a leading enterprise cloud management platform and the company behind the open source Crossplane project. Crossplane is designed for platform teams looking for a cloud-native infrastructure management solution. Customers use Upbound’s Universal Cloud Platform to transform their internal operations into a comprehensive cloud computing platform, simplifying infrastructure management and empowering developers with self-service capabilities. As a fully remote company, Upbound is backed by leading investors, including Altimeter, GV, Intel Capital, and Telstra Ventures. Learn more at upbound.io and follow us at @upbound_io.
