Supabase reels in $200M for its open-source relational database

Database developer Supabase Inc. has raised $200 million in funding from a group of prominent investors at a $2 billion valuation.

Fortune reported the investment today. The round included the participation of Accel, Coatue, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures and Felicis. The venture capital firms were joined by multiple angel investors, including OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil.

Supabase develops an open-source relational database of the same name. It’s positioned as an alternative to Google LLC’s Firebase database, which is designed to power web and mobile apps. Supabase claims that its platform is faster than Firebase and takes a few minutes to set up.

Under the hood, Supabase is an upgraded version of PostgreSQL, one of the world’s most popular open-source relational databases. PostgreSQL’s creator won the 2014 Turing Award partly for his work on the database. One of the platform’s flagship features is its support for ACID, a reliability standard that prevents data loss in the event of an outage.

Supabase extends PostgreSQL’s feature set with a number of additional capabilities. A tool called the Table Editor enables developers to edit the information in the database through an Excel-like interface, which removes the need to write SQL queries. Workloads, in turn, can interact with the records in a Supabase environment through an application programming interface the database generates automatically.

Some applications require the ability to quickly react to new data. A real-time sales tracking dashboard, for example, must refresh its interface after every new purchase. Supabase includes a feature that allows applications to detect when the information it stores changes and react in a few milliseconds.

Another capability, Supabase Cron, allows the database to run scripts at predefined time intervals. Developers could, for example, configure a script that checks if the platform contains duplicate records every 30 seconds and deletes any it finds.

Not all the applications that use a database require the ability to edit its contents. An outage monitoring tool, for example, might only view server error logs without changing or deleting them. For such use cases, Supabase provides the ability to create multiple read-only replicas of a database and deploy them in different cloud facilities. 

Supabase’s read-only replicas reduce the load on the main database, which boosts response times for workloads that do require the ability to edit records. Other applications, meanwhile, may retrieve information from the replica located closest to them, which reduces latency. The replicas double as backups of the main database that ease recovery in the event of an outage. 

Developers can optionally use Supabase replicas in conjunction with a feature called Edge Functions. It reduces latency by running code in data centers near users. Edge Functions lends itself to tasks such as powering artificial intelligence applications and blocking malicious requests to websites.

Today’s funding milestone follows a period of rapid growth for Supabase. According to Fortune, the company’s sign-up rate has doubled over the past three months thanks partly to the growing popularity of vibe coding, or the use of AI to automate coding tasks. Supabase includes a feature that allows it to store vectors, the mathematical structures in which AI models keep their knowledge.

The company disclosed on occasion of the investment that its user base has topped 2 million developers. Those developers manage more than 3.5 million Supabase database environments, some of which are used by Mozilla Foundation, Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub unit and other major tech firms. The company generates revenue by selling a managed cloud version of its database that eases day-to-day maintenance tasks. 

Image: Supabase