Paul Copplestone

Paul Copplestone is the co-founder and chief executive of Supabase, the open-source Postgres platform that has become one of the fastest-growing pieces of infrastructure in the AI era. Raised in New Zealand and known online by the handle @kiwicopple, Copplestone built his career as a full-stack developer and serial entrepreneur before turning his attention to databases, a subject he has described as unglamorous but foundational to everything else in software.

Before Supabase, Copplestone co-founded two other ventures: ServisHero, a marketplace for service providers that grew into one of South-East Asia's largest platforms of its kind, and Nimbus For Work, an office management tool, where he served as chief technology officer. That hands-on experience shipping products convinced him that developers were spending too much time re-building the same backend plumbing — authentication, storage, real-time subscriptions — around every new application.

In 2020, working with co-founder Ant Wilson, Copplestone launched Supabase through Y Combinator's Summer batch, pitching it explicitly as an open-source alternative to Google's Firebase, but built on top of PostgreSQL rather than a proprietary NoSQL store. The bet was that Postgres's maturity, extensibility and enormous ecosystem made it a stronger long-term foundation than closed, vendor-specific databases, and that developers would pay for a slick, managed layer on top of it.

That bet has paid off spectacularly amid the rise of AI-assisted 'vibe coding', where large language models generate application backends on the fly and need a database that just works. Supabase's user base surged as AI coding tools defaulted to it for new projects, and the company's valuation climbed accordingly: from roughly $2 billion in April 2025 to $10.5 billion by June 2026, when it closed a $500 million round. Under Copplestone, Supabase says it now serves several million developers worldwide.

Copplestone has become a prominent voice for the open-source, developer-first school of building infrastructure companies, arguing that transparency and community trust — not lock-in — are what let a database platform earn a place at the centre of the modern AI stack.