Why We Invested in Supabase
“Build in a weekend. Scale to billions.” Postgres Supa-charged.
By Michael Robinson & Zao Chen
We’re excited to announce that Craft co-led the $80M Series C round in Supabase, the open source Postgres platform loved by developers around the world. We’re joined by co-lead Peak XV and existing investors Coatue, Felicis, and Y Combinator in supporting Supabase on its journey to become the go-to backend platform for developers building and scaling applications.
Databases are the backbone for modern-day app development and one of the largest categories in software. With the increasing adoption of software and AI for automation, the amount of data and workloads required to service applications has grown significantly. Developers need easy-to-use, scalable database solutions that enable them to build and run their applications in production from day one. Relational databases are a popular choice because of their structured data format and performance.
Over the last few decades, Postgres has become one of the leading database systems, loved by developers for its extensibility and its SQL compatibility. At his previous start up, co-founder/CEO Paul Copplestone experienced the limitations of other database services — namely Firebase — and turned to Postgres to create an open-source alternative. Once it was posted on HackerNews, it quickly became a hit with developers. Paul then teamed up with co-founder/CTO Ant Wilson. This was the beginning of a great database company, Supabase.
With Postgres at its core, Supabase not only manages databases but has a suite of services including authentication, file storage, edge functions, vector store, and many more to give developers all the tools they need to launch their applications. Its intuitive UX means developers can start building in minutes. With the recent rise in AI, Supabase’s pgvector capabilities, their native vector embeddings store, have been a popular option to build AI-native applications. The proof is in the numbers: Supabase has 70K+ stars on Github with 700K+ developers and 1M+ databases hosted on the Supabase platform.
Supabase is loved by the developer community and enterprises alike. More than 40% of the latest Y Combinator batch are building with Supabase, as are developers from Fortune 500 companies including Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft. More and more enterprises are building on Supabase, and the Craft team has already partnered closely with Supabase to share our deep PLG expertise and playbooks which stem from years at Yammer, Dropbox, ClickUp, Figma, and Slack.
When we first met Paul and Ant, it was clear they were building something special and had gathered a talented and passionate 80+ person team. We were impressed by the team’s pace of execution, which has led to a product that developers love and to which they actively contribute.
Developers and companies of all stages love Supabase and so do we. We’re excited to join them on their journey as they scale to billions.
