AI vibe coding startup Supabase, co-founded by Kiwi Paul Copplestone, raises US$500m at US$10b valuation
An AI start-up co-founded by a Kiwi has raised US$500 million ($837m) in Series F venture capital funding at a US$10 billion valuation – a five-times increase in less than a year.
One of the hottest artificial intelligence trends is so-called “vibe coding”, where you create anything from a website to a new app simply by describing it, in natural English, to a generative AI.
The process is simple – but requires some more involved tools under the bonnet.
One of them is Supabase, a start-up co-founded by Christchurch-raised Canterbury University grad Paul Copplestone and Liverpudlian Ant Wilson, who both ended up at the famed Y Combinator business incubator in Silicon Valley.
The start-up, founded in 2020, offers the Supabase AI Assistant and other tools to wrangle “Postgres”, an open-source database used by millions of software developers and vibe coders to quickly create a feature like real-time subscriptions. Its tagline is “build in a weekend: scale to millions”.
The rise of native AI coding tools like Claude Code has fueled its growth.
And these days it’s now used by many for their day job rather than a weekend project, with users at firms like Netflix, LinkedIn, IBM, Google, Microsoft, HP, SAP, Shopify, Meta and Salesforce.
The US$500m round was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, with support from new investors Stripe and Salesforce, with support from existing shareholders Accel, Y Combinator and Coatue.
The size of shareholdings hasn’t been revealed. Typically, co-founders’ stake has been diluted to somewhere between 10 to 15% by a Series F round (the sixth round of issuing new shares to raise capital).
While big database players like Oracle are still firmly ensconced, Copplestone and Wilson’s thinking is that every software revolution – in this case, AI and vibe coding – allows for disruption in the underlying database layer.
Investors agree.
Supabase raised US$150,000 in pre-seed funding in late 2020, and things quickly snowballed from there with a US$6m seed round the same year, followed by US$30m (2021), US$80m (2022), another US$80m (2024) and US$200m (2025) rounds - the latter at a US$2b valuation.
The AI-powered super ex-pats
Copplestone’s SupaBase is now top-of-the-pops among a raft of Kiwi ex-pats who have founded or co-founded AI firms.
The posse includes:
Alex Kendall, the London-based co-founder and chief executive of Wayve, the maker of the self-driving tech that steers Uber’s first robotaxis. In February, Wayve raised US$1.5b at a US$8.6b valuation from Uber and other investors (including NZ’s Icehouse Ventures, which chipped in $12.5m).
Dave Ferguson, the San Francisco-based co-founder and co-chief executive of another autonomous driving startup, Nuro. Last August, Nuro raised US$203m at a US$6b valuation from backers including Nvidia (Icehouse again got its foot in the door, chipping in $5m).
Hamish McKenzie, the San Francisco-based co-founder and “chief writing officer” at Substack, which would be deemed AI if you squint your eyes (it now offers a raft of artificial intelligence tools for workflow). Last July, Substack raised US$100m at a $1.1b valuation (Icehouse again chipped in $5m).
Those in the cheaper seats include Adrian Macneil, the former Treasury software developer, now relocated to Silicon Valley, who recently raised $40m at an undisclosed valuation for his physical world AI start-up Foxglove, Harry Mellsop, whose early stage firm Antioch, which operates in a similar field and recently raised $15m at a $102m valuation and Nic Lane, co-founder of UK AI-training start-up Flower Lab, which raised US$20m at a US$100m valuation.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.