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.”