 Live from Copenhagen-Denmark, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Live in Copenhagen-Denmark of KubeCon 2018 Europe, I'm John Furrier with Lauren Kudy, my co-host. Exciting startup news here, obviously it's a growing ecosystem, all the big names are in it, but great ecosystem of startups, one launching here, Yip Assam, Tavara, who's the founder and CEO of UpBound here on theCUBE. Website's going to go live in a few hours. We're here for a quick preview. Thanks for joining theCUBE today, appreciate it. And my pleasure. So, you got a company, no one knows about it. Now they're going to hear about it. What are you guys doing? What is UpBound about and what are you doing? So UpBound is going after the problem of multi-cloud. So the way to think about it is that we're seeing now the ubiquity of Kubernetes and if you think about what Kubernetes has done, it has solved the problem of taking many machines and make them into one and doing all the scheduling and management and becoming the operating system of a cluster, right? UpBound is the next level up. UpBound is essentially taking multiple clusters and solving a similar set of problems around running distributed systems, services, global services, across clusters. It was really interesting to hear CERN this morning talking about how they're managing 210 clusters and you think about 210 clusters. If you were talking about 210 machines, you'd be like, well, that's a lot of machines, right? This is 210 clusters. And so a similar set of problems exist at a higher level and that's the focus of UpBound. So you guys are announcing a financing $9 million from investment series A financing. Google Ventures is the lead in a variety of industry super reputable investors. What was the value proposition? Pitch, what got Google Ventures excited? What was the core value? Technology, business model, give us the deck. I mean, so my understanding of their investment thesis and it's hard to claim that you always understand this but essentially the next level of infrastructure problem is essentially around multi-cloud and enterprises are managing many clusters today, many different cloud environments, whether it's across regions of a public cloud vendor or it's across public cloud vendors or across hybrid boundaries on-premise versus private cloud versus public cloud. It's become a challenge to run things across clusters and there's a lot of interesting scenarios to be solved at that level. That was the premise of- So are you guys a management software piece? Are you guys technology? What's the product? We're essentially building a service that helps companies run across cloud environments and it's based on Kubernetes. This Kubernetes is an amazing platform to build on top of and we've learned that through our investment in Rook and it's a great extension points and awesome community to be working with and so that's that we're offering a service for multi-cloud. Is it going to be, is some shape of it going to be open source or what are you looking at in particular? Yeah, obviously there'll be parts of it that are open source. We're a big open source company. The team that's in upbound is actually the team that's behind Rook and Rook is a CNCF project now and all open source obviously. And so yeah, we're definitely an open source player. So you're exposed to the storage challenges with Rook and all the future kind of architecture. That's right. We've all crossed on, we are both high-fiving each other and celebrating that microservices is going to be a modern era. How do you guys solve that problem? What is it going to be? The buyer going to be a cloud architect? Is it going to be a storage person? Is it an ops person? Who's the target buyer of your service or user of your service? Well, essentially dev ops people that are managing multiple clusters today and understand the challenges around managing multiple clusters. No normalization of policies, separate users, separate user management, observability, all those things come up with the strategies. And of course, let's not forget stateful workloads and managing state across environments is, I'd say probably one of the harder problems. And so the buyer is essentially somebody in dev ops and obviously the CTO, CIO level gets involved at some point. When you guys were forming the company, obviously with the Rook project you exposed some of the pain points you mentioned, a few of them, what was the one pain point that jumped out at you the most that you said, Dan, we can build a company around this? The fact that most enterprises are now managing multiple cloud environments and they are completely independent, there, anything that they try to normalize or do across them is there's a human involved or there's some homegrown script involved to actually run across clusters. And honestly, that's the same problem that people are trying to solve across machines, right? And that led to some, the work that's happening around orchestration, Kubernetes and others. So it's only logical that we move up a level and solve a similar set of problems. Yeah, I have a question about your service, just along the lines of, there are a lot of people coming into this market with we've got this integration solution that is multi-cloud or we have this kind of API platform that can solve for multi-cloud and run applications across multiple cloud platforms. What is your differentiator? Yeah, so I mean, multi-cloud has become a thing now as you've observed. I think the power of what we're doing is that we're building a control plane based on Kubernetes and the great work that's happening in the Kubernetes space around multi-cluster and federation and everything else. And offering a set of services that layer on top of that that solve some critical problems across clouds, including stateful workloads and migration portability across clouds. And essentially inherently building this on the Kubernetes platform and our experience with that and experience with the community around Kubernetes, I think differentiated. So that leads me to my next question. So your pricing model, you said that you were going to be open source. So is that control plane going to be open source and then some services are going to be bucketed into? It's probably too early for us to talk about the pricing model but think of it as a service and managed service for multi-cloud. And so you can imagine that open source is actually quite compatible with a service play. Yes, it is. And $9 million, that's a good chunk of cash. Congratulations, use of funds. Obviously, hiring out of the gate, what's your priorities on the use of funds on the first round of funding? So we're going to accelerate hiring, we're going to accelerate delivering the service and this is the fun part of a startup as my second one. So it's the next 18 months is all building and growing and doing product. And what's your five-year pro-former revenue projection? You made it up on the VC. Let me pull up my spreadsheet. I love those VC slides. Yeah, we're making up year five. But you want to have some growth. So the trend is your friend. Here it's multi-cloud. That's right. And obviously the growth of microsurfaces, obviously, right? Anything else out there that's on your mind observationally looking at the market? I mean, as you start coming, certainly you're doing a lot of due diligence on the market. What are your risk factors? How are you thinking about it? What are you looking at closely? How are you studying some of the trend data? I mean, at some level, you know, the way to think about this is, you know, cloud native is still at its infancy, right? Despite all the amazing momentum that's building around it. You know, I think, you know, at some level, we use the term cloud native, but it's really just cloud computing. And that's, yeah. So I think the adoption cycle is going to be interesting. So that's something that I think about a lot, you know, how long will people kind of make transformative changes to what they're doing? But I believe the power of open source in the community is that people are, you know, let me look at this conference, a lot of people are here, including... No doubt open source is a good bet. That's right. We're watching, I'd love to get your reaction to, and Lauren, you too, is that Stu Miniman might go, he's not here, he's at the Dell EMC world event. We talk about this all the time around the, what's the migration going to look like from on-prem to cloud? Meaning, obviously on-prem is transforming to cloud ops. That's right. Right, it's okay, perfect for your case, I think. What's the ratio? What's hybrid cloud going to look like when you have a true private cloud, true cloud environment on-premise? Because this speaks to the multi-cloud trend, because if I can have an on-premise operation, I can... Very much. Well, you have to look at the applications, too. I mean, that's critical, because we've got these monolithic applications that have to be, you know, essential, change and port it into different environments to become multi-cloud. There's heavy lifting there. Yeah, I think the interesting thing about what you're describing here is that it used to be that, you know, if you were running on-premise, you're using a completely different stack from, say, when you're running, what you're running in the public cloud, right? And so, not only was the choice about where you're hosting your compute and your networking and storage, but it was also a choice of stacks, right? Your, you know, open stack or whatever you're running on-premise, and then there was, you know, Amazon or others, right? What is happening now is that we're actually normalizing on stacks. So this whole movement around Kubernetes is essentially, you know, a way to say that there is now a common stack regardless of where you're actually being deployed, right? The story's not always there, and that's, you know, but it'll get there, right? And so, at some level, it gives people more choices about where they want to host, and in fact, if, you know, portability becomes more interesting because you could move out in and out of clouds, right? I mean, there are costs to doing that. There, data gravity is a thing. But containers are helpful. Containers are helpful. But, you know, that Amazon truck goes in one direction. So, it is interesting to think about that. But at least it becomes possible for people to think about how to manage their infrastructure and how to manage their services across clouds. And, you know, end results will have more choices. I think this community, you talked about on our intro today about portability is really what this community cares a lot about. Very much. And choice and non-lock-in. It's amazing how many companies that we talked to that actually have like a strategy, CTO-CIO level down, around not getting locked into any vendor. Yet, they are not able to fulfill that. It's hard to talk about lock-in when you actually don't even know what cloud native is. So, it's interesting. Discussion, and Agent Kalkarov was just on from Amazon, and he and I were talking with Lauren about that's a developer organization and management discussion, first. That's right. So, if you can't, you don't know what it is. How do you know what? Lock-in looks like. They can't play chess if you don't know what checkmate looks like. Yeah, but the good news is that developers are, you know, kind of pile up on that food chain now and they're able to actually make these buy decisions. So, I think that's going to be critical. Well, congratulations on the financing. Thank you. Love the company name Upbound. Yes. Upbound. Essentially going above the clouds. Above the clouds. Congratulations. Looking forward to tracking the progress and great to have you on theCUBE. Nine million dollars in fresh financing. Upbound just scored a great deal for multi-cloud. Again, that's a great trend. Congratulations. More CUBE coverage here in a moment. Thanks for watching. Be right back. Stay with us.