Supabase
Company History
Supabase History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones
Founded 2020 in Singapore
When was Supabase founded?
Supabase was founded in 2020 in Singapore by Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson, making it 6 years old.
- Founded
- 2020
- Founding place
- Singapore
- Founders
- Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson
- Headquarters today
- San Francisco, California (fully remote, no offices)
- Milestones documented
- 9 (2020–2026)
- Current CEO
- Paul Copplestone
- Acquisitions
- 4
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson found Supabase and join Y Combinator Winter 2020 |
| 2020 | $6 Million Seed Round |
| 2021 | $30 Million Series A |
| 2022 | $80 Million Series B |
| 2022 | Acquired Logflare |
| 2024 | Announces the acquisition of OrioleDB |
| 2025 | Raises a $200 million Series D led by Accel at about a $2 billion valuation |
| 2025 | Raises a $100 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation led by Accel and Peak XV |
| 2026 | Raises a $500 million Series F led by GIC at a $10.5 billion post-money valuation and rele |
- Where was Supabase founded?
- Supabase was founded in Singapore in 2020.
- Who founded Supabase?
- Supabase was founded by Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson.
- When did Supabase start?
- Supabase was founded in 2020.
- How old is Supabase?
- Supabase is 6 years old as of 2026.
Founding Story
In 2019, Paul Copplestone was living in Singapore, having previously founded and scaled several startups across Southeast Asia, while Ant Wilson was building developer tools in New Zealand. Both engineers were passionate about open-source software and frustrated by the limitations of Firebase. They noticed that every time a development team outgrew Firebase, they spent months painfully rewriting their backend in PostgreSQL. Copplestone and Wilson began collaborating on an open-source real-time engine for PostgreSQL written in Elixir, allowing developers to listen to database mutations over WebSockets. In late 2019, they incorporated Supabase and applied to Y Combinator, being accepted into the W20 batch. When they launched their initial GitHub repository with the slogan 'The Open Source Firebase Alternative,' the project went viral, accumulating thousands of GitHub stars within days. Realizing they had struck a generational nerve, they expanded the platform to include automatic REST APIs, authentication, file storage, and serverless edge functions, igniting a global open-source movement.
Founders
Paul Copplestone
Paul Copplestone co-founded Supabase in 2020 and has been CEO since. A third-time founder from New Zealand, he has pushed the company to keep its core tools open source and to build on standard Postgres. He led Supabase from Y Combinator W20 to a $10.5 billion valuation in June 2026. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Ant Wilson
Ant Wilson co-founded Supabase in 2020 alongside Paul Copplestone. As the absolutely critical technical architect, he heavily drove the massive, highly ambitious effort to stitch together heavily proven open-source tools (like PostgreSQL) into a seamless, unified cloud platform, fundamentally creating the first viable open-source alternative to Firebase. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Key Milestones
Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson found Supabase and join Y Combinator Winter 2020
Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson found Supabase and join Y Combinator Winter 2020; the project launches as "the open source Firebase alternative".
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAcquired Logflare
Supabase acquired Logflare. Acquired the Logflare log management service to provide built-in logging and analytics.
Source: supabase.comAnnounces the acquisition of OrioleDB
Announces the acquisition of OrioleDB, raises an $80 million Series C led by Craft Ventures and Peak XV, and declares general availability.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgRaises a $200 million Series D led by Accel at about a $2 billion valuation
Raises a $200 million Series D led by Accel at about a $2 billion valuation (April).
Source: en.wikipedia.orgRaises a $100 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation led by Accel and Peak XV
Raises a $100 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation led by Accel and Peak XV (October).
Source: techcrunch.comRaises a $500 million Series F led by GIC at a $10.5 billion post-money valuation and rele
Raises a $500 million Series F led by GIC at a $10.5 billion post-money valuation and releases Multigres v0.1 alpha (June).
Source: supabase.comMajor Acquisitions
OrioleDB
2024Brought the OrioleDB team and storage engine in-house to build a faster, bloat-free storage engine for Postgres.
Logflare
2022Acquired the Logflare log management service to provide built-in logging and analytics.
Turso
2026Database platform built around SQLite to support agentic workloads.
Oriole
2024Solve advanced database challenges within PostgreSQL.
Keep researching Supabase
Supabase Company History FAQ
When, where, and by whom was Supabase founded?
Supabase was founded in January 2020 in Singapore by Paul Copplestone (CEO) and Ant Wilson (CTO). The company emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2020 (W20) batch with the core mission of building "The Open Source Firebase Alternative" entirely on top of PostgreSQL.
What prompted the founders to create an alternative to Google Firebase?
While building prior startups in Southeast Asia and New Zealand, Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson found Firebase magical for rapid prototyping but painful to scale. Firebase relied on proprietary NoSQL databases (Firestore and Realtime Database) that made relational queries, complex joins, and data migrations exceedingly difficult, leading to painful vendor lock-in.
What was the first open-source tool developed under the Supabase banner?
The first component was "Realtime," an open-source server written in Elixir and built on the Phoenix framework. It listened to PostgreSQL's write-ahead log (WAL) and broadcast database insertions, updates, and deletions to client frontends over WebSockets with minimal latency.
How did Supabase achieve viral developer traction upon launch?
In May 2020, Supabase shared its open-source GitHub repository and Hacker News "Show HN" post with the tagline "The Open Source Firebase Alternative." The combination of full PostgreSQL power, instant PostgREST API generation, and zero proprietary lock-in resonated immediately, earning thousands of GitHub stars in days.
What are Supabase's signature "Launch Weeks"?
Originating in late 2020, "Launch Week" is Supabase's quarterly product release sprint. Across five consecutive business days, the team reveals major new features, open-source architectures, and developer tooling (such as Storage, Edge Functions, Auth, and Supavisor), accompanied by community hackathons.
How did the rise of generative AI and pgvector transform Supabase in 2023?
In early 2023, as OpenAI and LangChain catalyzed demand for vector databases to power Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Supabase championed pgvector (an open-source vector similarity extension for Postgres). Supabase demonstrated that developers did not need specialized niche vector databases when Postgres could store relational metadata, vectors, and embeddings together.
What is "Supabase for Platforms" and why did it become the company's fastest-growing product?
Launched in 2024, Supabase for Platforms is an infrastructure API enabling third-party software platforms and AI coding assistants (such as Lovable, Bolt.new, Cursor, and v0) to programmatically spin up, manage, and scale isolated Supabase Postgres databases directly for their end-users within seconds.
How much capital has Supabase raised across its major venture funding rounds?
Supabase has raised approximately $1 billion in total venture financing, including a $3.9M Seed, a $30M Series A (Coatue, 2021), an $80M Series B (Felicis, 2022), a Series C and D, and a landmark $500 million Series F led by GIC in June 2026.
What valuation milestones did Supabase achieve between 2022 and 2026?
Supabase reached unicorn status in 2024, crossed a $5 billion valuation in October 2025 during its Series E, and reached a $10.5 billion post-money valuation in June 2026 following its $500 million Series F financing round.
Why did Supabase choose to remain a 100% remote-first company with no physical offices?
Co-founders Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson established Supabase as a globally distributed organization from day one to access top-tier systems programming and database talent worldwide. Today, Supabase employs over 380 staff across more than 50 countries without maintaining any physical corporate headquarters.
What is Supavisor and why did Supabase build it?
Supavisor is an open-source, cloud-native connection pooler written in Elixir, released by Supabase in 2023. It replaced legacy PgBouncer to solve Postgres connection exhaustion issues in serverless architectures, capable of scaling to over 1 million concurrent client connections with sub-millisecond overhead.
How did AI app generation tools impact Supabase's database creation volume in 2025-2026?
Fueled by the explosion of "vibe coding" and AI generation tools like Bolt.new and Lovable, database launches on Supabase grew by more than 600% year-over-year, with over 60% of all newly provisioned databases originating programmatically from AI agents.
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