Supabase
Founders
Paul Copplestone, Ant Wilson · Founded 2020 · HQ today: San Francisco, California (fully remote, no offices)
Supabase was founded by Paul Copplestone, Ant Wilson in 2020. It is now led by Paul Copplestone.
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.
| Founder | Role at founding | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Paul Copplestone | Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer | — |
| Ant Wilson | Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer | — |
Software developer and serial founder from New Zealand who previously ran startups before Supabase.
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).
British software engineer and entrepreneur.
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).
Paul Copplestone
Co-founder & CEO
Third-time founder from New Zealand who has led Supabase as CEO since 2020.
Ant Wilson
Co-Founder & CTO
As Co-Founder and CTO, he ensures the platform remains completely open-source, heavily driving the aggressive rollout of new features like edge functions and vector storage for AI.
Supabase was co-founded by Paul Copplestone (CEO) and Ant Wilson (CTO). Both founders are originally from New Zealand and possess extensive backgrounds in software engineering, distributed systems, and open-source software development.
Ant Wilson is a veteran full-stack engineer and systems architect. Prior to Supabase, Wilson founded and developed several web and developer productivity tools, developing deep expertise in frontend developer experience, database schema design, and developer tooling ergonomics.
In 2019, Paul was living in Singapore while Ant was in New Zealand. Bonding over shared frustrations with Firebase's proprietary NoSQL limitations, they collaborated asynchronously over GitHub, building an open-source Elixir WebSocket server that streamed real-time Postgres mutations.
The founders realized they did not need to invent a brand-new database from scratch. By standing on the shoulders of giants and combining best-in-class existing open-source tools—PostgreSQL for data, PostgREST for APIs, GoTrue for auth, and Elixir for real-time sync—they could build a world-class platform faster than any proprietary competitor.
Ant and Paul chose the slogan because it instantly communicated value to every developer who had ever used Firebase: it promised the exact same magical developer speed, but with the safety, relational queries, and freedom from lock-in of open-source PostgreSQL.
In 2020, the founders struggled with managing connection spikes in serverless environments, securing multi-tenant Postgres deployments on AWS, and combating free-tier abuse from automated bots and cryptocurrency miners without compromising onboarding friction.
Paul Copplestone serves as CEO, directing strategic vision, investor relations, commercial enterprise partnerships, and developer marketing; Ant Wilson serves as CTO, overseeing platform architecture, developer experience (DX), internal engineering culture, and frontend UI design.
Ant Wilson championed Supabase Studio, the intuitive web-based administrative dashboard that allows developers to view, edit, and query Postgres tables as easily as an interactive spreadsheet, bridging the gap between non-technical users and complex relational databases.
The founders instituted an asynchronous "writing-first" culture inspired by Git commit logs and open-source mailing lists. They use GitHub Discussions and RFCs for decision-making, evaluate team members on delivered code rather than hours online, and host annual global team retreats.
Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson have been widely recognized across the software industry, winning numerous developer choice awards, keynoting global database conferences, and being celebrated as leading examples of open-core commercial success in the Y Combinator ecosystem.
Instead of trying to outbid hyperscalers for generic corporate engineers, the founders proactively hired the creators and maintainers of the open-source tools they relied on (such as Steve Chavez, the core maintainer of PostgREST), paying them full-time salaries to continue maintaining their open-source projects.
Both founders remain guided by developer empathy, a disdain for enterprise vendor lock-in, commitment to permissive open-source software, and a belief that the best software products win through superior user experience and community trust.
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