Upbound Appoints Sarah Strobhar as Chief Revenue Officer to Accelerate Growth of AI-Native Infrastructure

SEATTLE, WA, [August 19, 2025] /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Upbound, the company behind the open-source Crossplane project and a leader in AI-native infrastructure platforms, today announced the appointment of Sarah Strobhar as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Strobhar will lead global sales, go-to-market, and customer success as enterprises adopt Intelligent Control Planes to power AI-driven infrastructure operations.

Strobhar brings more than 15 years of experience building enterprise sales organizations and scaling adoption of cloud and AI/ML technologies. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), she served as Global Go-to-Market Leader for Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports, and as Worldwide Head of Business Development for Applied AI, overseeing a portfolio of AI/ML and Generative AI services. In these roles, she helped drive revenue growth across AWS's Line of Business (LOB) solutions and AI/ML portfolios. She has also helped scale early-stage AI startups. Strobhar holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a BS from Ohio University.

Her appointment comes at a pivotal moment for Upbound. With the launch of Upbound Crossplane 2.0 and the company’s vision for the Intelligent Control Plane, enterprises now have a path to unify state, policy, knowledge, and intelligence across infrastructure.

“Enterprises are racing to harness AI, but infrastructure has become the bottleneck,” said Bassam Tabbara, CEO of Upbound. “Sarah not only drove revenue growth for multi-billion dollar businesses at AWS, she also built global go-to-market strategies that scaled adoption at enterprise pace. That track record makes her the ideal leader to accelerate our revenue growth and help customers run their platforms at AI speed.”

Upbound empowers infrastructure and platform teams with intelligent control planes, built on Kubernetes and Crossplane, that provision, operate, and adapt — ensuring platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents. The launch of Upbound Crossplane 2.0, alongside the release of the Intelligent Control Plane Architecture, underscores the company’s commitment to leading the shift toward autonomous, AI-powered infrastructure.

“I see clear parallels between this moment in AI infrastructure and the early days of public cloud,” said Sarah Strobhar. “At AWS, I saw firsthand how applying AI/ML to real business use cases could unlock billions in enterprise value. Today, organizations are again facing bottlenecks that stall innovation, while AI is shifting from assistance to autonomy. Yet, most infrastructure still depends on human workflows. Upbound recognizes that the future won’t be defined by more tools and pipelines, but by intelligent platforms that can operate at the speed of AI. I’m thrilled to join at this inflection point and help customers future-proof their infrastructure.”

Strobhar’s appointment marks a significant milestone in Upbound’s journey to accelerate adoption of AI-native infrastructure platforms.