About Paul Copplestone
Paul Copplestone is the co-founder and CEO of Supabase, the open-source Postgres development platform that started as an "open source Firebase alternative" and has become the default backend for many AI app builders and coding agents. He founded the company with CTO Ant Wilson; the two met while living in a shared house of technical founders after Entrepreneur First in Singapore, and went through Y Combinator.
Supabase grew on developer community, launch weeks and Hacker News, and in the AI era it became the backend that coding agents and tools like Lovable and Bolt pick by default. In October 2026 it announced a $150 million round and the acquisition of Turso to scale to the billions of small databases agents are expected to create.
Career Highlights
- Co-founded Supabase with Ant Wilson; went through Y Combinator
- Built a realtime engine on Postgres at a previous company after migrating off Firebase, the seed of Supabase
- Led Supabase from eight users on its first Hacker News launch to about 5 million new databases a month
- Acquired Turso in 2026 to power a lightweight database tier for agent-built apps
Notable Positions
On Agents as Customers
The Supabase founders say agent-driven signups convert better than traditional developer signups because the agent completes setup in one step. Their bet is that agents and AI app builders will need billions of tiny databases a month that can grow into full Postgres when a project takes off.
On Product-Led Sales
Supabase emails accounts that hit product triggers, keeps non-responders as a control group (25% monthly growth) and pays salespeople on the incremental uplift from those they help (125% growth). Enterprises, in their view, almost never migrate production databases, so the goal is to win greenfield projects on day one.
Key Quotes
- "At the moment we launch about 5 million databases on our platform every single month." (on scale; from the joint Latent Space interview with Ant Wilson)
- "So that 100% uplift, the incremental uplift is what we compensate our salespeople." (on sales compensation; from the joint Latent Space interview with Ant Wilson)