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. In its first month the repository got one new star.
Attention arrived in a single month, seven months before the seed round
From October 2019 to April 2020 the repository gained 100 new stars in total. In May 2020 it gained 1,120. The number of people opening and merging pull requests moved much less: four in May, six 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 was the repository's biggest year for new stars: 21,481. It was also the year the contributor base widened. In the busiest month of 2021, 70 different people opened, closed or merged pull requests, against 19 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: 4,657 | 2021: 21,481 | 2022: 18,023 | 2023: 18,045 | 2024: 15,366 | 2025: 13,954 |
|---|
New GitHub stars on supabase/supabase per calendar year, from 4,657 in 2020 to a peak of 21,481 in 2021 and 13,954 in 2025. 2026 is left out because it is counted only to April.
Developer activity peaked in 2023, and the rounds grew after it
On commits, pull requests and forks, 2023 was the high point. The default branch took 11,993 commits that year. The busiest month had 122 people working on pull requests, and the year added 3,324 forks.
| Year | Forks added | Pull request events | People on pull requests, busiest month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 186 | 433 | 19 |
| 2021 | 1,411 | 1,829 | 70 |
| 2022 | 1,846 | 5,861 | 88 |
| 2023 | 3,324 | 7,682 | 122 |
| 2024 | 2,619 | 7,599 | 111 |
| 2025 | 2,717 | 5,875 | 95 |
After 2023 the two lines separate. New stars fell each year, to 13,954 in 2025, and the monthly peak of people on pull requests fell from 122 to 95. The funding went the other way: 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 |
The later rounds were not priced on stars. 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 one committer and 100 stars gained more than ten 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 weaker. By 2024 the repository was a large, busy project whose activity no longer rose with each round. 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, forks and pull request activity come from GitHub's public activity record, counted per month from October 2019 to April 2026. A new star is counted when it happens. GitHub does not record when a star is removed, so these counts slightly overstate net growth.
- People on pull requests is the number of distinct accounts that opened, closed or merged a pull request in a month. 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 repository figures here were produced by Vela's repository briefs, which read a public repository's history and cite each claim to the record it came from.
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, stars and contributors rose alongside each round: new stars peaked at 21,481 in 2021, the year of the Series A. After 2023, yearly new stars fell while the rounds grew, so stars stopped tracking the size of the rounds.