While other startups are hoarding resources for the winter, Supabase is stepping on the accelerator. On October 4th, this open-source database unicorn announced a $100 million Series E funding round, pushing its valuation to $5 billion - just four months after its $200 million Series D round, and seven months before an $80 million Series C round. Within a year, it has raised $380 million, and its valuation has increased more than five times. The speed of its fundraising is comparable to "hot reload" in "atmospheric programming": one click refresh, and the valuation jumps by a zero.
Supabase's magic is simple: packaging the most established relational database, Postgres, into a "developer-friendly package". Login, file storage, auto-generated APIs, vector search... setting up a backend used to take a week, but now it can be launched with just a few clicks. Because it's so "user-friendly", it has become the default "hard drive" for AI coding tools - Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor, Claude Code, and even Figma's new AI features all run on Supabase. CEO Paul Copplestone joked: "We don't write front-end, but we make the back-end as invisible as air - you can't see it, but you can't live without it."
Even more impressive is that this YC startup, which was founded in 2020, has now opened a "community shareholder" channel: among the 4 million registered developers, some write code, others submit PRs, and they can also buy some original shares, combining sentiment and stock options. Firebase is backed by the Google ecosystem, while Supabase chooses a "everyone is a shareholder" mass approach - turning the open-source community into capital partners, which is a first in Silicon Valley.
Currently, the explosion of AI applications has made databases the new "battlefield". With vector plugins, edge functions, real-time subscriptions, and a complete set of "AI-native" weapons, Supabase is evolving from a Firebase replacement into the infrastructure of "atmospheric programming". Is $5 billion the end? In an internal letter, Paul wrote: "First, bring Postgres to every developer's fingertips, then talk about stars and oceans."
