Funding news: Upbound raises $60M for cloud infrastructure, competitive intelligence startup Klue lands $62M
The news: Seattle-based cloud management platform startup Upbound has raised $60 million in new funding. Upbound helps enterprise customers consolidate and streamline their workflow in the cloud.
The gist: Upbound has built a “Universal Cloud Platform” for users to manage multiple cloud vendor environments and switch to different clouds, such as between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. The platform also simplifies the operating environment for developers.
The tech: Upbound leverages Kubernetes, the open-source container-orchestration project originally developed at Google to manage complicated cloud deployments. The 30-person startup is also behind Crossplane, an open-source cloud management project.
The backers: Altimeter Capital led the Series B round, a component of the new funding. Participating investors are GV, Intel Capital, and Telstra Ventures. The new cash brings Upbound’s total funding to $69 million.
The take: Companies want to avoid being locked into a single cloud vendor. Upbound can help them stay more nimble. “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 in a statement. Tabbara launched Upbound in 2017 after stints with Quantum, Symform (a startup he co-founded that Quantum acquired); and Microsoft.
More deals:
— Business intelligence startup Klue raised $62 million. Vancouver-based Klue pulls data from sources ranging from news postings to competitor web pages to provide data on business competitors. Klue aims for customers to be “ready and armed to go toe-to-toe against their competitors, instead of getting blindsided,” said CEO Jason Smith in a blog post. Smith, former president at Vision Critical, co-founded the company in 2015 with former Sophos exec Sarathy Naicker.
Tiger Global led the Series B round, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. The funding for the six-year old startup builds on a $15 million Series A round last year.
— HaptX, which makes realistic gloves for VR and robotics, pulled in $4 million from Crescent Cove Advisors, bringing Series A funding for the Redmond, Wash.-based startup to $28 million.
— Vancouver, B.C.-based Lucent Biosciences, which has developed a new type of agricultural fertilizer that uses cellulose fibers as a delivery agent, raised $4.2 million.
