Supabase CEO on the “painful” decisions that built a $5B company

Vibe coding has taken the tech industry by storm, and it’s not just the Lovables and Replits of the world that are winning. The startups building the infrastructure behind them are cashing in too. 

Supabase, the open-source database platform that’s become the backend of choice for the vibe-coding world, raised $100 million at a $5 billion valuation just months after closing $200 million at $2 billion. But co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone has a surprising strategy: he keeps turning down million-dollar enterprise contracts from deep-pocketed but demanding customers. He’s betting instead that if he sticks to his own product vision, the world will come to him. So far, he’s been right.  

Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie Bort sat down with Copplestone to explore Supabase’s rise and what it means for vibe coding, developers and the database giants who have historically controlled this market. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why Copplestone believes “the death of Oracle won’t take a generation” 

The technical moonshots Supabase is funding to make Postgres even more scalable 

How he decides which enterprise deals to turn down, and why it still “feels very painful” 

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