PostgreSQL database specialist Supabase snags $100M in funding

Five months after Databricks Inc. acquired one of its main rivals for $1 billion, Supabase has raised $100 million in late-stage funding to build a database tool dubbed Multigres.

Announced today, the Series E investment was led by Accel and Peak XV. Supabase is now worth $5 billion.

After its previous $200 million round in April, the company disclosed that its installed base included more than 2 million developers. Fortune reported at the time that the growing popularity of vibe coding helped Subase double its sign-up rate over the preceding three months. In today’s funding announcement, the company said its installed base has grown to more than 4 million developers.

Supabase offers a customized version of the popular PostgreSQL relationship database. The company has added in cybersecurity tools, a content delivery network and various usability improvements. Supabase also provides a large collection of features geared toward artificial intelligence developers, which is likely factoring into its rapid user base growth.

By default, PostgreSQL can’t efficiently hold embeddings, the mathematical structures in which AI models keep their knowledge. Supabase’s implementation of the database uses an open-source tool called pgvector to add support for embeddings.

Embeddings are compressed, numerical representations of data such as product descriptions. Developers can use an application programming interface built into Supabase’s platform to turn their business data into embeddings. They can then manage those embeddings using a Python client provided by the company. Python has a relatively simple syntax that makes it possible to perform complex tasks using a small amount of code.

Supabase’s AI feature set also includes a tool called Edge Functions. It enables developers to create serverless functions using JavaScript, another relatively simple programming language.

Edge Functions provides an integration with Hugging Face, a cloud platform that hosts more than 100,000 open-source AI models. Customers can use those models to process the embeddings they keep in the database.

Supabase’s AI capabilities are available alongside dozens of other additions to the core PostgreSQL feature set. Among them is a branching tool, which developers can use to quickly create copies of a production database. Branching is also a core selling point of Neon, a competing PostgreSQL distribution whose developer was acquired by Databricks in May for a reported $1 billion.

Supabase will use its latest funding round to build an “enterprise-scale” version of its platform called Multigres. The company has hired Sugu Sougoumarane, the co-creator of a popular open-source technology called Vitess, to support the effort. Vitess makes relational databases more scalable by distributing them across multiple servers.

Supabase also plans to put its new capital to use in other ways. “Every single round we have allowed our employees to sell 25% of their vested stock,” Chief Executive Paul Copplestone (pictured, left, with Chief Technology Officer Ant Wilson) wrote in a blog post today. “This round is no different, and we will continue to do this for future rounds. Additionally, we are accelerating hiring for key open-source initiatives.”

Supabase plans to follow up the funding round with a $1 million raise that will be open to early customers and contributors to the open-source version of its platform.

Photo: Supabase