Our Story

Hear About Our Story and the Experience We Bring.

For us, the name Upanup sums up our desire to do business with honesty and integrity, and to work with organizations that do the same. That principle is behind everything we do and has been with us from the start, when a meeting in a public library space between co-founders Peter Knapp and Richard Hammond inspired both the start of the company, and our name.

Richard Hammond and Peter Knapp

Our Journey So Far

We opened our first office in Victoria, B.C. in January 2012, and started our evolution from a two-person partnership to a diverse team of almost 40 valued staff members comprised of dedicated designers, developers, strategists, and marketing professionals across three provinces in Canada. With office presence in Victoria, B.C., Calgary, AB, and Kitchener, ON, we have the pleasure to connect and work with various organizations across Canada and the United States. Leveraging collaborative resources from offices in the three provinces, we offer services with high productivity and flexibility of business hours spanning across time zones, enabling Upanup to provide our clients with the best solution possible to meet their needs.

Our 10+ years of experience in providing digital solutions has translated into our high-quality work. As an established industry leader, we enjoy working with various organizations and offering our expertise in digital website solutions that prioritize user experience, accessibility, and mobile responsiveness. Whether we’re working with a local government, an international company, volunteering in our communities, or building new and innovative digital marketing solutions, we have the energy, imagination, and experience needed to yield great results.

Building a team and culture that share and reflect our values has been essential to our success, and as our team grows, so do our ambitions. We are constantly looking for new opportunities to do work that has a positive impact, both within our communities and on a global scale. Today, we continue to deliver solutions that help clients reach their goals and products that help people, but we are not ones to rest on our successes. We believe in continuous improvement, and we put our analytical, creative, and technical skills to work each day to make it happen.

Get to know the talented designers, developers, content experts, and marketing strategists that make up Upanup.

Meet our team

Upanup team wearing matching black sweaters.
Part of the Upanup team standing outside and smiling.

Our five core values keep us on track and delivering the best possible solutions. We refer back to these values for every project we do, and ensure they are the foundation for each project to be a success. These values are quality, integrity, efficiency, progress and friendliness. Read more about our values.

Indigenous Land Acknowledgement

We extend our respect to all First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples for their past, present and future contributions to the lands where we are fortunate to conduct our work. As a team spread out across Canada, we are grateful to operate on the traditional, unceded territories of multiple groups of Indigenous Peoples.

In the Kitchener-Waterloo regions, our team operates on traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee Peoples. In the Calgary region, we operate on traditional territories of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy); the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuut’ina and the Iyarhe Nakoda; as well as the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. In the Victoria region, we operate on traditional territories of the Lekwungen (Songhees) Peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

We recognize and appreciate Indigenous Peoples’ historic connection to these places where we work. We seek to better understand the enduring history that has brought us to reside on the land, and we seek to understand our place within that history.

We are grateful for the opportunity to live and work here and re-affirm our commitment to make the promise and the challenge of Truth and Reconciliation real in our communities.

We’re proud that the custom solutions we build have won over 80 awards (and counting!) in international creative competitions.

See our awards