Supabase started as one person's Postgres tools repository
The supabase/supabase repository was created on 12 October 2019. Of the 82 commits on its default branch that year, 80 came from one account: kiwicopple, the GitHub account of Paul Copplestone, Supabase's chief executive and co-founder. The other two came from a second contributor.
The README at the end of 2019 described a smaller ambition than the one the company sells today. Its whole description was one sentence: "Supabase provide opensource tools that make PostgreSQL even better." There was no mention of Firebase, hosting or a platform.
Attention arrived in a single month, seven months before the seed round
From October 2019 to April 2020 the repository gained 140 new stars in total. In May 2020 it gained 1,020. The number of people opening and merging pull requests moved much less: three in May, four in June.
By the end of 2020 the README had changed its claim. It now described "an open source Firebase alternative" with a hosted Postgres database, realtime subscriptions, authentication, auto-generated APIs and a dashboard, in public beta. On 15 December 2020, TechCrunch reported a $6 million seed round, which Supabase says Coatue led.
Supabase changed how its README described it twice in seven years
A README's opening line is the most public statement a team makes about what it is building, and it changes when the team's own answer changes. Supabase's has had three versions.
| End of | Opening description | New in the feature list |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | "Opensource tools that make PostgreSQL even better" | None yet |
| 2020 | "An open source Firebase alternative" | Database, realtime, auth, APIs |
| 2022 | "An open source Firebase alternative" | GraphQL, edge functions |
| 2023 | "An open source Firebase alternative" | AI and vector toolkit |
| 2025 | "The Postgres development platform" | Same features, new name |
Every version since 2020 has kept a second sentence unchanged: "We're building the features of Firebase using enterprise-grade open source tools." The comparison to Firebase stayed in the README. It left the headline in 2025, the year of the Series D and Series E.
Stars and contributors rose together through the Series A and Series B
2021 brought 19,810 new stars, more than four times 2020's 4,195. It was also the year the contributor base widened. In the busiest month of 2021, 75 different people opened or merged pull requests, against 17 in the busiest month of 2020.
The money followed the same curve. Supabase raised a $30 million Series A, led by Coatue, in September 2021, and an $80 million Series B, led by Felicis, in May 2022. By Supabase's own count, its GitHub stars went from 19,000 to 36,000 between the two announcements.
| New stars | 2020: 4,195 | 2021: 19,810 | 2022: 17,000 | 2023: 17,602 | 2024: 14,927 | 2025: 20,393 | 2026 to Oct 16: 17,709 |
|---|
New GitHub stars on supabase/supabase per calendar year, from 4,195 in 2020 to 19,810 in 2021 and 20,393 in 2025, its biggest full year. 2026 is counted to 16 October.
Contributors reached new highs with the later rounds
The default branch took the most commits in 2023: 11,993. The number of people working on pull requests dipped in 2024 and then rose past its earlier peak. In the busiest month of 2023, 124 people opened or merged a pull request. In 2025 the busiest month had 148, and in 2026 it has had 209 so far. Almost half of the rise since 2023 is accounts that opened a single pull request that was not merged. Counting only accounts that had a pull request merged, the busiest month of 2023 (August) had 89 and the busiest of 2026 (September) had 111.
| Year | New stars | People on pull requests, busiest month |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 4,195 | 17 |
| 2021 | 19,810 | 75 |
| 2022 | 17,000 | 86 |
| 2023 | 17,602 | 124 |
| 2024 | 14,927 | 110 |
| 2025 | 20,393 | 148 |
| 2026 to Oct 16 | 17,709 | 209 |
2024 was the only year both measures fell. In 2025 the repository gained more new stars than in any earlier year. The funding grew much faster: four rounds between September 2024 and June 2026 raised $880 million, more than seven times the $116 million raised before them.
| Announced | Round | Amount | Led by | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2020 | Seed | $6M | Coatue | Not disclosed |
| Sep 2021 | Series A | $30M | Coatue | Not disclosed |
| May 2022 | Series B | $80M | Felicis | Not disclosed |
| Sep 2024 | Series C | $80M | Peak XV, Craft | Not disclosed |
| Apr 2025 | Series D | $200M | Accel | $2B post-money |
| Oct 2025 | Series E | $100M | Accel, Peak XV | $5B pre-money |
| Jun 2026 | Series F | $500M | GIC | $10B pre-money |
Repository activity alone does not explain the later valuations. Supabase's April 2024 developer update announced general availability, and by its Series F the company reported nearly 10 million users. GitHub measures developers who visit the repository. It does not measure people who build on the hosted product without ever opening it.
The repository told investors the most when it was smallest
The early signal was real and specific. A repository with 140 stars gained more than seven times that in a single month, and its README changed from a description of tools to the description of a product. Both happened before the seed round, and both are visible to anyone who reads the repository's history.
The later signal was smaller than the money. After a dip in 2024 the repository had its biggest year for new stars in 2025 and its busiest months yet on pull requests, while the four later rounds raised more than seven times the total of the first three. The growth Supabase reported in its later announcements was in users of the hosted product, which a repository does not see. GitHub was an early read on whether developers cared. It was never a read on what the company would be worth.
The README today opens: "Supabase is the Postgres development platform." Six years separate that sentence from "opensource tools that make PostgreSQL even better", and the repository records each step between them. We track repositories on the early part of the same curve in 19 emerging trends in open-source AI infrastructure.
How we measured this
- Commits, README text and releases come from the repository itself on GitHub: commit counts on the default branch per calendar year, the README as it stood at the end of each year, and the published releases.
- Stars come from GitHub's star history for the repository, counted by the day each star was given, from October 2019 to 16 October 2026. It counts the stars the repository has today, so a star that was later removed is not counted.
- People on pull requests is the number of distinct accounts, excluding bots, that opened or merged a pull request in a month, from GitHub's pull request records. It is not a count of employees or of everyone who contributed code.
- Funding rounds come from Supabase's own announcements and from TechCrunch, linked where each round is mentioned.
The README history and commit counts were produced by Vela's repository briefs, which read a public repository's history and cite each claim to the record it came from.
Correction, 16 October 2026: an earlier version took stars, forks and pull request activity from GitHub's public event archive. That archive has recorded a shrinking share of GitHub activity since May 2025, so the earlier version said stars and contributors kept falling after 2023. Both dipped in 2024 and then rose: 2025 was the repository's biggest year for new stars, and the busiest months of 2025 and 2026 had more people on pull requests than any earlier month. The figures now come from GitHub's own records.
Correction, 21 October 2026: the counts of people on pull requests included bot accounts, such as Dependabot, that GitHub does not mark with a [bot] suffix. They now exclude every bot account. The affected counts fell by one to four.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the Supabase GitHub repository created?
The supabase/supabase repository was created on 12 October 2019. In its first year, 80 of its 82 commits came from Paul Copplestone, Supabase's chief executive and co-founder.
How did Supabase describe itself on GitHub?
At the end of 2019 the README described opensource tools that make PostgreSQL even better. From 2020 to 2024 it described an open source Firebase alternative. By the end of 2025 it described the Postgres development platform.
How much funding has Supabase raised?
Supabase has announced seven rounds totalling $996 million: a $6 million seed in December 2020, a $30 million Series A in 2021, an $80 million Series B in 2022, an $80 million Series C in 2024, a $200 million Series D and a $100 million Series E in 2025, and a $500 million Series F in June 2026.
Did GitHub stars predict Supabase's funding?
In the early years, attention came first: the repository gained 1,020 new stars in May 2020, seven months before the seed round. Stars dipped in 2024 and then rose with the later rounds, to 20,393 in 2025, its biggest full year, but far more slowly than the funding, which grew from $116 million across the first three rounds to $880 million across the next four.