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.”