$9 Million Series A for Unbound Led by GV (Formerly Google Ventures)

Upbound, a cloud-native computing company enabling organizations to run, scale and optimize their services across multiple public and private cloud environments, announced the close of a $9 million Series A financing round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures).

It will use this investment to expand its core engineering and product team, whose current members have experience working at HBO, Lyft, Microsoft, Nutanix, and Symform.

In addition, the company also announced that it’s joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

As organizations move more of their services to public and private clouds, technical teams are finding themselves managing multiple disparate environments across or within clouds, on-premises, and across geographically dispersed regions to meet user demand. This sprawl creates complexities around management, consistency of network and security policy, observability, and compliance within these environments that ultimately results in increased complexity/costs and reduced capability/performance.

Upbound delivers a multi-cloud platform based on Kubernetes that enables organizations to treat multiple disparate environments as one. This allows organizations to build scalable, readily available, multi-cloud services and reduce the cost and complexity of managing, securing, and scaling these services. The company enables a new level of automation, cost optimization, capacity overflow, failover, policy enforcement and portability across cloud environments.

“With the widespread adoption of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies we are embarking on a new era of cloud-computing. Enterprises are asking for a more open cloud with more choices and less vendor lock-in,” said Bassam Tabbara, founder and CEO, Upbound, who was co-founder and CTO of Symform, which Quantum acquired in 2014. “Upbound will help enterprises run, scale and optimize their workloads across clusters, regions, and clouds in a Kubernetes-centric way.”

Founded in late 2017 by Tabbara, Upbound is comprised of the team that is behind the Rook project, an open source storage framework for Kubernetes that addresses the complexities associated with running stateful workloads. In January, the project became the first storage project hosted by Cloud Native Computing Foundation and continues to see rapid growth and adoption. Rook extends Kubernetes with new portable abstractions for stateful workloads enabling a new level of portability across clouds.

“Upbound presents a credible approach to multi-cloud computing built on the success of Kubernetes, and as a response to the growing enterprise demand for hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Dave Munichiello, general partner, GV. “We were initially drawn to Upbound’s vision of true enterprise workload portability, and believe in the technical strength of this founding team to generate a significant impact on the market for multi-cloud computing.”

As part of today’s announcement, Upbound is also announcing it’s joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

“The momentum around cloud-native computing is building and we are seeing broad adoption of our projects within the enterprise. Multi-cloud is a critical part of this future,” said Dan Kohn, executive director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “I am excited to have member companies like Upbound help drive this vision forward.”

Upbound’s multi-cloud platform will also cater to ISVs offering solutions that scale across cloud environments. It provides ISVs with a multi-cloud control plane to deploy, manage, and optimize their services across multiple clusters.

“Upbound provides a crucial missing piece in the infrastructure puzzle around orchestration of distributed and often disparate workloads, something that will be a huge value for the CockroachDB community,” said Spencer Kimball, CEO and founder, Cockroach Labs.

Read also:
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Hosts Rook Project to Further Cloud-Native Storage Capabilities
Brings file, block and object storage systems into Kubernetes cluster.
2018.02.08 | Press Release