Upbound Raises $60M in Funding to Advance its Universal Cloud Platform

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce that we’ve raised $60M in new funding. Our Series B was led by Altimeter Capital with participation from existing and new investors, GV, Intel Capital, and Telstra Ventures. We will use the new funding to continue serving the Crossplane community, accelerate product development, and expand our go-to-market globally. To-date, Upbound has raised $69 million.

Why we started Upbound

We started Upbound 4 years ago because we saw three secular trends now sweeping across the cloud computing landscape. First, there was not going to be a single winner in cloud and that customers would choose best of breed cloud services to build upon regardless of who sold them. The phenomenal growth of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, along with the successes of Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Elastic, Mongo, and others are obvious signals of this trend. The cloud market is quickly shifting towards horizontal integration.

Second, organizations are rapidly hiring SREs and DevOps engineers to form specialized “platform teams” chartered with empowering application developers to take advantage of the diversity of cloud services and infrastructure under their control. These teams are struggling with managing the complexity and are effectively operating a modern internal cloud platform with legacy IaC tooling, chatops, ticketops, scripts and human workflows.

Third, while Kubernetes has become the de-facto container orchestrator, it has broader applicability. Kubernetes has democratized control theory, with its control plane offering an intuitive well-designed API for declaratively managing and continuously reconciling resources.  The Kubernetes-first approach to managing infrastructure is being favored by platform teams and has become a prerequisite for adopting new technologies and products.

Crossplane – Universal Control Plane

Crossplane lives at the intersection of these three trends. It’s a community-driven open source project which gives platform teams 1) a universal API to address and manage any infrastructure or service from any vendor, and 2) the ability to compose custom cloud resources unique to their organization and expose them as their own platform API. Crossplane builds on the Kubernetes control plane and supports the broad ecosystem of tooling around it out of the box. With Crossplane, platform teams can consolidate all workloads around cloud native projects and adopt modern GitOps driven engineering practices.

We launched Crossplane in 2018 with the intention of having it become the convergence point for the industry. We donated Crossplane to the CNCF in order to create a neutral ground for collaboration and in less than three years Crossplane has emerged as the Universal Control Plane for the cloud, and the first project to arrive at a Universal API for the cloud. Today Crossplane is being deployed by hundreds of companies and sits at the heart of their digital modernization initiatives.

Upbound – Universal Cloud Platform

Major cloud platforms like AWS are built using a control plane supported by value-add features like SDKs, CLIs, consoles [etc]. Upbound's commercial offerings provide these features and services to help platform engineers build cloud platforms with amazing developer experiences, fast. Upbound Cloud and Enterprise offer some of these features today with many more coming. Our products are helping Fortune customers increase their pace of innovation today.

Being an open source company, we also have a clear strategy for and responsibility to balance the value we create in open source vs. the value we capture through our commercial products. We will continue to be good stewards of open source and be transparent with the community.

Join Us

Upbound is hiring across different roles to help accelerate our vision of building a universal cloud platform. Upbound is a full remote and global company. Work from anywhere! See our open positions.

Finally, this funding milestone would not be possible without the support of our community, customers, and partners. Thank you all for believing in Upbound, and supporting us through this journey.