Paul Copplestone

Paul Copplestone, a New Zealand–born engineer, is the co-founder and CEO of Supabase, an open-source alternative to Google’s Firebase that gives developers a hosted Postgres database, authentication, and storage. Founded in 2020, it grew into one of the most popular backends for indie developers and startups.

The backend of the vibe-coding boom

When AI app builders like Bolt and Lovable exploded, Supabase became the default database many of their users deployed — putting it at the center of the “vibe coding” economy. The company grew from around a million to more than four million developers in a year and raised at a $5 billion, then $10.5 billion, valuation. Copplestone describes the shift in “waves,” arriving at a present in which someone can start an app on their phone, “kick it across to their laptop, and then it scales out.”

He is unabashedly bullish — half-joking that Supabase’s future is “the $50 billion, $100 billion outcome” — while candid that the nature of the work is changing: developers, he says, will write less code by hand as AI takes on more of the routine building.