Supabase Secures $80M in Series C Funding to Enhance Postgres-Based Developer Platform

Exclusive: Supabase, a Postgres-centric developer platform, raises $80M Series C

Supabase, the open source developer platform and Postgres database service that started out as an alternative to Google's Firebase, on Wednesday announced that it has raised an $80 million Series C round led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures. With this, Supabase has now raised a total of $196 million, including a Series B round in 2022, which was also an $80 million round. And while Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone didn't disclose the new valuation in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch ahead of Wednesday's announcement, he did stress that it was an up round. He also noted that the company only recently started dipping into its reserves from the Series B. As with so many database services these days, it's the AI boom that is driving a lot of demand for Supabase as well. For Postgres, that means supporting the pgvector extension, something the company offered very early on. "Not many cloud providers had pg vector, so we were the first to offer it [...]. Then AWS came, and we worked quite closely with AWS to promote usage throughout the industry," Copplestone explained. Currently, he estimated, about 10% of active databases on the service power AI use cases. Another usage stat that has held true for a while is that 40% of startups in the latest Y Combinator class uses Supabase, but the company is also increasingly making inroads with enterprises, often to power some of their more experimental applications. GitHub Next, for example, uses the service, as well as developers at companies like Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft. Supabase actually held off on calling its service "generally available" until earlier this year because the team wanted to make sure that it could support enterprises and offer the robust service they'd need. Copplestone also noted that in the company's early days, most pundits looked at the company as an open source alternative to Google's Firebase. The fact that the company was using Postgres was secondary at the time. But over the years, Supabase has positioned itself more clearly as a Postgres platform -- and whether planned or by luck, Postgres continues to grow in popularity while there hasn't been much hype around Firebase for a while now. "We've kind of won on two factors: people adopt us because we're easy to use, like Firebase, and people adopt us because we're Postgres, and Postgres is popular to use. Combine those two, and you've got the easiest Postgres offering," Copplestone said. He also stressed that the company's authentication product is very popular. For some companies, it's actually the first Supabase product they use because while Supabase offers a total of six products (database, storage, auth, edge functions, vector, and realtime), they can all be used as standalone products. In addition to lead investors Peak and Craft, Avra Capital, the new fund of former YC Growth Fund Director Anu Hariharan, participated in this round, as well as previous investors Coatue, Felicis, and Y Combinator. "Supabase is redefining database management with its open-source, managed Postgres platform, and with over 900,000 sign-ups in four years, it's seen unprecedented organic adoption among developers," Hariharan said. "We're excited to see the results of Supabase's Vercel marketplace partnership. We believe that for companies seeking a robust, developer-friendly solution, Supabase's Postgres platform is rapidly becoming the preferred choice."

Supabase, the Postgres-based application development platform, raises $80M in funding - SiliconANGLE

Supabase, the Postgres-based application development platform, raises $80M in funding Open-source application development platform and Postgres database service provider Supabase Inc. said today it has closed on an $80 million Series C round of funding, bringing its total amount raised to date to $196 million. Today's round, which was first reported by TechCrunch, was led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures, and saw participation from Avra Capital plus previous investors Coatue, Felicis and Y Combinator. Supabase, which also raised $80 million via its Series B funding round in 2022, didn't reveal a valuation. However, the company's co-founder and Chief Executive Paul Copplestone told Techcrunch that the latest investment was an "up-round", which means its value has increased. The company bills itself as an open-source alternative to Firebase, which is Google LLC's primary application development platform, used by developers to design and build apps for Android and iOS, as well as web applications. Besides providing an integrated development environment, Firebase offers a database service, tools for tracking analytics, reporting and fixing bugs, plus feature experimentation. Supabase offers many of the same core features that developers need to start building applications, with its main component being a Postgres database. It also provides authentication services, edge functions, real-time subscriptions, storage and vector embeddings on top of its main Postgres offering. Copplestone told TechCrunch that Supabase stands out as one of the first Postgres companies to support the pgvector extension - a key element that enables the Postgres database to store and query vectors. This is an important capability for developers of generative artificial intelligence applications, as their underlying large language models primarily rely on unstructured data, which is best stored as "vector embeddings", or numerical representations of that data, so it's easier for models to discover. According to Copplestone, AI has been a big growth area for the company, with about 10% of active databases on its services being used to power AI applications. Although Supabase's website continues to proclaim the company as an alternative to Firebase, Copplestone told TechCrunch that he now sees it as more of a "Postgres platform". It's a shift that probably makes sense, as Postgres is growing in popularity among database users, while there is barely any mention of Firebase these days. "People adopt us because we're easy to use, like Firebase, and also because we're Postgres, and Postgres is popular to use," Copplestone said, adding that the combination of the two also makes Supabase the "easiest Postgres offering". Postgres isn't the only big draw of Supabase though, as it also gets a lot of new customers through its authentication service. According to Copplestone, this is the first product that many of Supabase's new customers use, and once they start using it, they soon start exploring its Postgres database and other products. The company said it's seeing strong traction in terms of enterprise customers, with developers at companies like GitHub Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Netflix Inc. and Microsoft Corp. all using its platform. Avra Capital's Anu Hariharan also highlighted Supabase's growth, saying the company has seen more than 900,000 sign ups in the last four years. "It has seen unprecedented organic adoption among developers," he added. "We believe that for companies seeking a robust, developer-friendly solution, Supabase's Postgres is rapidly becoming the preferred choice."