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 who are winning. The startups that build the infrastructure behind them also make money.

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

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

Listen to the full episode and hear more about:

• Why Copplestone Believes “Oracle’s Death Won’t Last a Generation”

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

• How he decides which business deals to turn down, and why it still ‘feels very painful’

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