Store All the World's Data

In early June, fresh off an interview with CNBC, Paul Copplestone jumps on a Zoom with his cofounder, Ant Wilson, who is in his childhood bedroom in Liverpool.

CNBC's angle: how Supabase (opens in new tab), the open-source backend platform, came to power much of the agentic coding boom. Paul wants a gut-check. Should he not have mentioned that the company is named after the Nicki Minaj song Super Bass? “I realized afterwards that probably wasn't the audience I should have mentioned that to,” he says. “Then I thought: That'll probably make us stand out!”

Standing out was something Paul had to learn. He grew up in New Zealand with what Kiwis call “tall poppy syndrome,” the instinct not to rise above the field for fear of getting cut down. He shed most of that at his first startup. The modesty and easygoing nature stayed.

The next day, the CNBC story will go live, announcing the company's $500 million Series F at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, led by GIC. Every existing investor joined, Felicis among them.

Felicis first backed Supabase four years earlier, leading its $80 million Series B in May 2022 (opens in new tab). “The world is short on full-stack engineers, and software that simplifies the backend wins,” Aydin Senkut (opens in new tab) wrote at the time. The firm saw a tool that could make building applications easier without hiding Postgres or locking developers into a proprietary ecosystem.

Ant, home to introduce his newborn daughter to his parents, isn't worried about how the origin story plays with a CNBC audience. He and Paul have had this debate before, and it always lands in the same place: developers love the name (opens in new tab).

It started as a placeholder. Brainstorming during Covid, they grabbed supabase.io because they thought it would be fun to exchange Super Bass memes (opens in new tab).

Today, Supabase counts 10 million+ developers, more than double the number just eight months earlier. Neither cofounder takes them for granted. “For a product-led growth company (opens in new tab), your community is your channel,” Paul wrote in a post called Enterprise Sales vs Product-led Growth (opens in new tab). “Once you lose it, you'll never get it back.”

The trade-offs: million-dollar enterprise contracts turned away, and the frontend passed over as the vibe coding let-AI-pick-the-stack wave took off. In exchange, they kept the layer underneath all of it, and the loyalty, too.

Open-Source Firebase Alternative

Ant and Paul found each other over strong opinions about developer communities at the startup accelerator Entrepreneur First. Far from Ant's Liverpool home and Paul's family farm in Kaikoura, New Zealand, they bonded on a group trip to Vietnam. By the end, everyone had moved into a hacker house on Orchard Road, Singapore's most famous street, where they gathered every Saturday to brainstorm the most outrageous ideas they could think of.

Paul had been circling one idea for a while. He'd run up against Google Firebase's limitations while building a real-time chat interface at his previous startup, migrated to Postgres, and designed a custom real-time wrapper that became an early blueprint for Supabase. He open-sourced it, and the GitHub stars started coming, the first evidence that developers wanted what he'd built. Those Saturday sessions gave him the push to pitch Ant a five-page deck: a vision for “real-time Postgres” (instant updates to the open-source relational database) and a plan to get into Y Combinator, which Ant had applied to four times without success.

He knew what a developer community could do. When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and shut down OpenSolaris, developers forked the project rather than let it die. One of those forks, OpenIndiana, gave Ant his first job.

After the holiday break, Ant returned to Singapore in January 2020 with his answer: “Obviously, this should exist.” He'd arrived at Entrepreneur First while working on his second startup, Crypto Squad, with a master's in software engineering from Imperial College London and the learnings of those YC rejections under his belt.

Years earlier, Paul had pitched the only investor he knew on the idea that became Supabase, only to be turned down flat. Now the timing felt right. Postgres, dating back four decades, was becoming the developer world's most popular database. Covid settled the question of how they'd work, and joining YC's first all-remote batch meant regular 2 a.m. Zoom meetings.

By spring 2020, they had eight databases and a tagline that wasn't landing. One evening, Ant switched the tagline on the site from “real-time Postgres” to “open source Firebase alternative.” By morning, community member Vignesh “Viggy” Ravichandran, then a database engineer at Cloudflare, had posted the tagline to Hacker News (opens in new tab). It took off.

Within days, 800 databases spun up on Supabase. “We weren't even really prepared to do a formal launch,” says Ant. “The community launched us.”

They came away convinced that product-market fit is largely positioning. Somebody out there wants what you're building; you have to find them and describe it in words they recognize.

Batteries Included: Launch Weeks, Memes and Product-Led Growth

They set out to keep giving the community something to respond to. Borrowing the discipline of YC's accelerator model, they adopted regular launch weeks, shipping six or seven features on a cadence developers could count on.

Launch weeks delivered a complete backend platform with “Batteries Included”: managed Postgres, authentication, file storage, edge functions, and real-time updates. Then came pgvector, a Postgres extension that lets developers store and search the data format AI models rely on. In August 2022, they followed with the Management API, the layer that, two years later, enabled AI coding tools to spin up databases programmatically, with no one clicking through a dashboard.

As the platform grew, bigger customers came calling. Supabase turned many of them away. Paul described walking away from million-dollar contracts as “very painful,” but also the right call. He laid out his reasoning in the Enterprise Sales vs Product-led Growth (opens in new tab) blog post. In it, he cited the cautionary tale of Groupon, which over-extracted from its email subscribers one test at a time, until the channel was burnt out. By the time Groupon noticed, it was too late to fix.

Inside Supabase, Craig Cannon, head of developer relations and marketing, holds a standing veto over anything that would make developers feel marketed to. No to “boring webinars.” Hard yes to memes.

Since its first Super Bass meme, the company has posted more than 40,000 (opens in new tab). One of the most shared is “the chill dev,” a developer who accidentally deletes hundreds of thousands of database rows and remains completely unbothered. A meme costs nothing to publish and tells the team within hours whether the frustration it names is real. If it goes viral, that's a product signal. Ant, known inside the company as its unofficial Chief Meme Officer, puts it simply: “We always try to meet developers where they are.”

Sales works the same way. Supabase watches for developers in trouble, a disk getting thrashed or CPU limits hit, and reaches out about the problem rather than the upgrade. “Our sales actually just looks like support,” Paul has said (opens in new tab). “We actually don't really want to sell to people.”

Ant interviewed the first 250 Supabase employees himself. No rubric, no fixed questions; just a winding conversation to excavate how good a fit the candidate would be. “It's hard to articulate because it's more intuition,” says Ant, who originally wanted to be an archaeologist but was told it wasn't a viable career path. “Trying to get a sense for: is this person going to require assistance, or can we drop them into the team and they'll figure it out themselves?”

At Supabase, that quality has a name, which emerged from those early launch weeks: Batteries Included. In the developer community, the term means self-sufficient and resourceful.

It's one of five values the company runs on, alongside Kaizen Mindset, Egoless, Truth Seeking, and Undeniable. At an offsite, the team ranked them. Egoless came out on top, above Undeniable, which means being so good you can't be argued with. Paul had ranked them the same way privately. “If you could have both an undeniable culture and an egoless culture, why would you not want that?” he has explained (opens in new tab).

Former founders, drawn to the high-autonomy, async culture, make up about a quarter of the team. Supabase also hires open-source contributors who make themselves so indispensable that “they leave us with no chance but to hire them,” Ant says. “Because we can't imagine if this person stopped contributing, what would we do?”

Aside from its annual offsite, Supabase has no office: more than 350 employees work across more than 60 countries, including Tajikistan, Brunei, and Peru (opens in new tab). Nobody's pay is adjusted for where they live. “We're not competing against every other Silicon Valley company for tech talent (opens in new tab),” Ant says. “We have a global hiring pool of eight billion people and we can literally find the very best person for that one particular role, regardless of where they live.”

Most engineers have one meeting a week; the rest of the work lives in Slack, Notion, GitHub, and Linear. These platforms are all essentially documentation repositories that allow developers to work async and supercharge their AI coding tools with irreplaceable context.

Supabase had built everything around one assumption: a developer on the other end who knew what a backend was and had chosen this one deliberately.

In fall 2024, a different kind of builder started showing up.

Earthquake Tremors: How Lovable and AI Coding Tools Changed Supabase

Craig calls what came next “earthquake tremors.” The dashboard began spiking in a way the team associated only with attacks. “We actually thought we were getting DDoS'd,” Paul says. “We went and looked and said, ‘Oh, there's this application launching ridiculous numbers of databases. Is it spam? Are they trying to cost us a lot of money?’ And it turned out, no, they were real.”

The source was Lovable, routing its users directly to Supabase with no outreach or coordination. Supporting a sudden wave of non-technical users was, in Craig's words, brutal. Lovable's users had no idea there was a database behind their apps, any more than a Netflix viewer thinks about AWS. Capacity strained. Infrastructure, customer success, and support all had to be reworked at once.

“There was a lot of tension across the entire org,” Paul says. “A lack of clarity: Should we support Lovable? Will they pay? Is it a good use case?”

The debate was resolved at their March 2025 offsite in Spain. Paul says, “The question behind the question is: what we are building is a database service. Rather than have our one thing compete with their one thing, we'd rather support an entire category of customers that need the same service.” Rather than build a Lovable competitor, Supabase would stay at the infrastructure layer and make itself foundational to the entire category of agentic coding tools.

From that bet-the-company call emerged Supabase for Platforms, the white-label productized version of what was happening ad hoc. Companies like Lovable, Bolt, and Vercel can now embed Supabase infrastructure without their end users ever knowing. It has been the company's fastest-growing product over the past year. The more successful it gets, the fewer people will realize they're using Supabase at all.

In 2026, database launches on Supabase grew 600%, and more than 60% of new databases are now started by some kind of AI tool. Claude Code and Codex, Paul says, keep widening the pool of people who can build.

No Size You Can't Go To: Multigres and Scaling Postgres

That same spring, as the Lovable question was being settled, Sugu Sougoumarane, the engineer who built Vitess, the scaling layer that kept YouTube running on MySQL, sent Paul a LinkedIn message. Paul missed it. Word reached him through the community: Sugu was trying to get in touch. Two weeks after they spoke and agreed on an open-source version of Vitess for Postgres, Sugu was at Supabase assembling a team.

He's building Multigres, an open-source operating system for Postgres: high availability and operational simplicity now, with Vitess-grade horizontal scaling to come. “There will be no size you can't go to; petabytes, tens of petabytes, it won't matter,” Paul says. The engineer who made YouTube's database scale is now trying to do the same for Postgres. Supabase released the free, open-source v0.1 alpha the same day as the funding. It is ready to try, but not yet production-ready.

On the eve of the Series F announcement, with Ant's parents moving through the unblurred Zoom background, the conversation turns to spirit animals. They both search for something adaptable. Ant lands on a chameleon. Paul asks ChatGPT and gets an octopus. The explanation: “You spend a lot of time thinking in systems: databases, organizations, incentives, distributed systems, culture, investing, consciousness.”

They have advice for the 1,000 YC companies building on Supabase today: “You actually do have to do 1,001 things because you don't know which of those 1,000 will work,” says Paul. “So you have to be relentlessly prolific until you find the two or three things, and then you just double down, chip away, make them 10% better each time.” Ant, after five tries to get into YC: “I genuinely think I would have just kept trying until I got in, even if it took 25 years.”

“We want to be the largest, most successful database company,” says Paul. “We want to store all the world's data. But how to get there means probably many things — and who could have predicted the way AI changes the nature of storing or interacting with databases?”

A human is still behind each of those projects, even if they never know the name of the infrastructure they're building on.