Supabase, an open-source developer platform and Postgres database service that started as an alternative to Google's Firebase, announced Wednesday that it has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures.
This brings Supabase's total funding to $196 million, including its Series B round (also $80 million) in 2022. Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone didn't disclose the new valuation in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch ahead of Wednesday's announcement, but emphasized that it's an upround. He also said the company only recently began drawing down its Series B reserves.
Like many database services these days, the AI boom is driving demand for Supabase. For Postgres, that means supporting the pgvector extension, which the company offered quite early on. “Not many cloud providers offered pgvector, so we were the first to offer it,” Supabase said. […]”Then AWS came along, and we worked very closely with them to drive usage across the industry,” Copplestone explains. Today, he estimates that about 10 percent of active databases on the service power AI use cases.
Another usage statistic that's been around for a while is that 40% of startups in the latest Y Combinator class use Supabase. However, the company is also expanding its partnerships with larger enterprises, often powering their experimental applications. GitHub Next, for example, uses the service, as do developers from companies like Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft.
Supabase actually held off on making its services “publicly available” until earlier this year because the team wanted to make sure they could support businesses and provide the robust services they needed.
Image credit: Supabase
Copplestone also noted that in the company's early days, most commentators saw it as an open source alternative to Google's Firebase. The fact that the company used Postgres was a secondary issue at the time. But over the years, Supabase has become more clearly positioned as a Postgres platform. And, whether by design or luck, Postgres continues to grow in popularity, while Firebase hasn't been making much headlines in a while.
“We won on two fronts: they adopt us because we're easy to use, like Firebase, and they adopt us because we're Postgres, because Postgres is easy to use. When you combine the two, you get the easiest Postgres product to use,” Copplestone said.
He also highlighted how the company's authentication products are extremely popular: Supabase offers six products in total (Database, Storage, Authentication, Edge Functions, Vector and Real-time), all of which can be used as standalone products, so for some companies this is actually their first Supabase product.
In addition to lead investors Peak and Craft, the round also saw participation from Avra Capital, a new fund from former YC Growth Fund director Anu Hariharan, as well as previous investors Coatue, Felicis, and Y Combinator.
“Supabase is redefining database management with its open-source, managed Postgres platform, with over 900,000 sign-ups in four years and unprecedented organic adoption among developers,” said Hariharan. “We are excited about the outcome of Supabase's Vercel Marketplace partnership and believe Supabase's Postgres platform is quickly becoming the preferred choice for enterprises seeking a robust, developer-friendly solution.”