Paul Copplestone didn’t think things like this actually happened.
Then one day Accel’s Gonzalo Mocorrea asked for his New Zealand address—more than 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley.
Mocorrea “literally showed up on my doorstep in Wānaka, which is really not easy to get to,” said Copplestone, the CEO and cofounder of open source application development platform Supabase. “For the next two days, he’d pop in and we’d chat for a couple hours.”
After a few days in Wānaka—located on New Zealand’s South Island and famous for its snow capped mountains overlooking a massive mirror of a lake—Accel’s Mocorrea called in backup, texting partner Arun Mathew.
“Arun said ‘alright, I’m coming,’” said Copplestone. “And I said, ‘Oh no, don’t come! We haven’t agreed to anything!’ But yeah, he came, we had dinner in Queenstown, another beautiful place. We caught up the next morning, and they offered a term sheet.”
Accel’s Mathew had traveled more than 24 hours, across two flights and multiple car rides, to make the trip as the firm weighed its first investment in Supabase.
“I needed to sit across the table, look him in the eye, and really believe he’s going to do something else,” Mathew told Fortune. “That’s necessary, certainly at this valuation…We know what greatness looks like, we believe that—and I’m obviously betting with my career.”
That term sheet became Supabase’s latest funding round, a $200 million Series D valuing the company at $2 billion, Fortune can exclusively report. Coatue, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, and Felicis participated in the round, as did big-name angels like OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Laravel CEO Taylor Otwell.
“The core thesis for us is that in every major platform shift, there’s always value created at the database layer,” said Mathew. “It’s part of the reason that Larry Ellison and Oracle have held the same power for 40-plus years. It’s partially why MongoDB is one of the most interesting enterprise software companies out there…The database layer has a lot of dead bodies, but it also has a number of companies that have created exceptional enterprise value.”
Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases. The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and “vibe coders.”
“I see our community, over the next decade, as something that will grow with us, and it’s for everyone from developers, all the way up to enterprise,” said Copplestone. “It’s more than just developers even now. Our sign-up rate just doubled in the past three months because of vibe coding—Bolt, Lovable, Cursor, all those.”
