Founded in 2016, Heptio was conceived and built to support and advance the open Kubernetes ecosystem. The company was incubated with Accel Partner Ping Li and launched by Accel EIR Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie. Joe and Craig were the two founders of the Kubernetes project at Google previously. Accel seeded and lead Heptio's Series A. The company was acquired by VMWare in 2018.