Supabase: Powering the Next Generation of AI Applications

Today, Supabase announced that Accel led its Series D, capping an extraordinary period of growth and industry acknowledgement as the leading backend-as-a-service platform. We are grateful to be joined by some of the most visible entrepreneurs & luminaries in the space, including Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, Taylor Otwell from Laravel, Avery Pennarun from Tailscale, Milin Desai from Sentry, Shaan Puri from My First Million, Dan Fougere from Datadog, and Kevin Weill from OpenAI. Paul would be happy to emphasize – Supabase didn’t need the capital, nor were they actively raising. We had to shake Paul down in his hometown of Wanaka, New Zealand in order to get his attention. 

With that said, we're excited to share our perspective on Supabase's journey so far and the expansive & exciting opportunity ahead.

Supabase is a “backend-as-a-service” platform–a cloud platform that provides a Postgres database and other critical services like Auth, Storage, Realtime messages, and Edge Functions. Like Stripe for payments, Vercel for frontend deployment, or Twilio for messaging, Supabase gives developers fully managed infrastructure with batteries included. 

With over 2 million developers on the platform, more than 10K new databases launched per day, and (unpaid) community meetups in 43 countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Supabase has emerged as the trusted backend-as-a-service brand. The Supabase slogan “build in a weekend, scale to millions” is not just marketing, it’s factually correct. Many companies have started with a Supabase Pro plan and have scaled to over 1 million users with Supabase as their core backend provider. 

Getting to this point—broad-based community love in one of the most competitive markets in software—didn’t happen overnight. Along the way, Paul and Ant made a number of contrarian bets that continue to fuel Supabase’s rise. 

First, Supabase is all-in on Postgres. Instead of building a proprietary engine, they committed to one of the most trusted and beloved databases in the world. Back in 2020 when Supabase was founded, Postgres’s leadership position was less certain – but the rise of AI, support for semi-structured data, and the emergence of pgvector have cemented its relevance and importance. Supabase has doubled down on this ecosystem, contributing over 25 open-source tools (including a language server) and sponsoring projects that push Postgres forward.

Second, every product decision at Supabase is driven by developer experience. Rather than simply offering Postgres hosting, the team has steadily built the services developers need as they scale — Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, and Realtime messaging, to name a few. Supabase didn’t tack these on; they built them as deeply integrated yet composable features, with clean APIs and a unified UI. The result is a backend that feels modern, ergonomic, and fast. In December, Supabase launched its AI Assistant, which went on to win Product Hunt’s Data Product of the Year. This growing ecosystem of tools has fueled a “community of communities” that’s just getting started.

Third, Supabase stands out for its commitment to open source. As DB providers tinker with open source licensing and introduce various methods of ‘vendor lock-in,’ Supabase is steadfast in ensuring that portability and extensibility are core to the platform, even as the company scales to millions of developers. 

The unique product conception has also given way to new avenues for growth. Supabase is the de-facto backend for projects on leading AI app-building and software development platforms – including the likes of Vercel’s v0, Bolt, Lovable and Cursor. As a result, Supabase is helping empower a new generation of builders, dramatically accelerating their path from idea to live application – without having to write a single line of backend code.

Throughout our time in New Zealand and beyond, Paul and Ant’s clarity of vision, ambition, and integrity have punched through. Supabase has accomplished an extraordinary amount in short order, all while keeping the team small and agile. 

At Accel, we’ve long believed in backing the builders—teams creating the tools that power modern software development. That belief has led us to partner with companies redefining the developer experience, from Atlassian and Vercel to Sentry, BrowserStack, Linear, and Laravel — and now, Supabase. Today’s funding will help cement Supabase’s positioning as the standard backend for AI-driven applications. We’re honored that Paul and Ant have trusted Accel in leading this round, and we look forward to being a committed partner throughout the journey.