Bassam Tabbara

Founder and CEO Upbound

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

Bassam Tabbara is the founder and CEO of Upbound, the company behind Crossplane, an open source framework that lets platform teams build their own cloud control planes on Kubernetes: a single API through which infrastructure across providers is provisioned and governed. He founded Upbound in 2017, and Crossplane went on to become one of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s more widely adopted projects, graduating in November 2025 with more than 3,000 contributors and, by the company’s count, over 1,000 organizations running it in production. Upbound sells the commercial platform built around it and has raised $69 million, including a $60 million financing led by Altimeter Capital in 2021. It is his second company: he earlier co-founded Symform, a cloud storage business whose platform and team Quantum acquired in 2014, and he then served as Quantum’s CTO.

Career Highlights

• Founded Upbound in 2017; SEC filings list him as its executive officer, director and promoter.
• Created Crossplane, which joined the CNCF in 2020 and graduated, the foundation’s highest maturity level, in November 2025.
• Announced $60 million in new funding in November 2021, including a Series B led by Altimeter Capital with GV, Intel Capital and Telstra Ventures.
• Co-founded Symform and served as its CTO; Quantum acquired Symform’s cloud storage platform and development team in July 2014.
• Served as CTO of Quantum after the acquisition, and co-created the CNCF project Rook.

Professional Journey

Tabbara’s first company was Symform, a Seattle cloud storage start-up that he co-founded and where he served as CTO; the company’s 2009 SEC filing lists him as an executive officer and director. In July 2014 Quantum Corporation, the data storage company, bought most of Symform’s assets, which its quarterly filing described as the cloud storage services platform and development team, to strengthen its cloud software for data protection and scale-out storage. Tabbara went with the team and became Quantum’s CTO.

He founded Upbound in 2017. Its bet was on the control plane: rather than having application teams file tickets or write provider-specific infrastructure code, a platform team defines its own APIs for databases, clusters and networks, and a Kubernetes-based control plane keeps the real infrastructure continuously matched to them. Crossplane, the open source project Upbound created to do this, joined the CNCF in 2020. He had already co-created Rook, another CNCF open source project, so Upbound began with a founder who had built a community around cloud-native infrastructure before.

Upbound’s funding followed Crossplane’s adoption. Its first SEC filing records about $9 million raised in 2018. In November 2021 the company announced $60 million led by Altimeter Capital, with GV, Intel Capital and Telstra Ventures, after what it called ten-fold quarter-over-quarter recurring revenue growth driven by Crossplane. The company says it has raised $69 million in total.

Since then Upbound has positioned itself around AI infrastructure. Crossplane graduated from the CNCF in November 2025, and in August 2026 Upbound launched Upbound v3, which it describes as giving teams one view, one API and one governance model across their fleet of control planes, for both people and AI agents. Upbound says it now serves Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers in more than 100 countries and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. Tabbara remains Founder and CEO and sits on the Crossplane Steering Committee.

Education

No education record was found in any first-party source.