Supabase, the backend-as-a-service startup, announced this week that it has raised a Series A of $ 30 million.
Supabase is often described as an open source alternative to Google’s Firebase … which is a pretty good phrase for those who know what Firebase is. For those who don’t, Supabase is a collection of tools that help developers build projects faster by doing much of the behind the scenes and cabling work automatically.
Create a project and Supabase will provide you with a Postgres database. an API for interacting with the database that automatically evolves (and documents itself!) as your database changes; a user authentication system compatible with major login providers (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc.); a storage system for handling things like image and video uploads; and a user interface to monitor and manage everything. It takes a lot of work that you would have to do to create just about any modern app or service and throw it away in a few clicks.
Supabase is free for hobby projects (or if you just want to tinker with it). As soon as you need larger databases or data backups, the price starts at 25 USD per project per month. Alternatively, you can deploy it yourself, although this is a little more difficult and currently means the loss of the administrative user interface.
This Serie A comes pretty quickly after the company’s last raise – a $ 6 million round announced in December 2020. I was told that this round was largely funded by Coatue, with some reserved for a few major new angel investors including GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon, and Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes.
Supabase co-founder Paul Copplestone tells me that the team now consists of 24 people spread across the world. “We were born remote,” he said.
That reasoning is twofold: the company started growing as the pandemic spread, and for the most part is hiring people who are already working on the tools and helping make the supabase happen. Why let them go around the world when they are already doing a good job?
“We use six different tools, I think,” said Copplestone. “And we employ lead maintainers for several of these tools. We employ open source contributors, everyone who makes contributions, no matter where they live. “
Supabase was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 class, the accelerator’s first completely remote cohort. In the meantime the YC classes are getting bigger and bigger; the batch S20, for example, was sold to over 200 companies. It can be hard to get noticed in a group like this, but Supabase seemed to pull it off – I heard chatter early and often about them.
Here’s what it looks like to start a supabase backend: