The rise of native AI coding tools like Claude Code has fueled its growth. <\/p>\n
And these days it\u2019s now used by many for their day job rather than a weekend project, with users at firms like Netflix, LinkedIn, IBM, Google, Microsoft, HP, SAP, Shopify, Meta and Salesforce.<\/p>\n
The US$500m round was led by Singapore\u2019s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, with support from new investors Stripe and Salesforce, with support from existing shareholders Accel, Y Combinator and Coatue.<\/p>\n
The size of shareholdings hasn\u2019t been revealed. Typically, co-founders\u2019 stake has been diluted to somewhere between 10 to 15% by a Series F round (the sixth round of issuing new shares to raise capital).<\/p>\n
While big database players like Oracle are still firmly ensconced, Copplestone and Wilson\u2019s thinking is that every software revolution \u2013 in this case, AI and vibe coding \u2013 allows for disruption in the underlying database layer.<\/p>\n
Investors agree.<\/p>\n
Supabase raised US$150,000 in pre-seed funding in late 2020, and things quickly snowballed from there with a US$6m seed round the same year, followed by US$30m (2021), US$80m (2022), another US$80m (2024) and US$200m (2025) rounds – the latter at a US$2b valuation.<\/p>\n
The AI-powered super ex-pats<\/p>\n
Copplestone\u2019s SupaBase is now top-of-the-pops among a raft of Kiwi ex-pats who have founded or co-founded AI firms.<\/p>\n
The posse includes:<\/p>\n
Alex Kendall, the London-based co-founder and chief executive of Wayve, the maker of the self-driving tech that steers Uber\u2019s first robotaxis. In February, Wayve raised US$1.5b<\/a> at a US$8.6b valuation from Uber and other investors (including NZ\u2019s Icehouse Ventures, which chipped in $12.5m).<\/p>\n Dave Ferguson, the San Francisco-based co-founder and co-chief executive of another autonomous driving startup, Nuro. Last August, Nuro raised US$203m at a US$6b valuation<\/a> from backers including Nvidia (Icehouse again got its foot in the door, chipping in $5m).<\/p>\n Hamish McKenzie, the San Francisco-based co-founder and \u201cchief writing officer\u201d at Substack, which would be deemed AI if you squint your eyes (it now offers a raft of artificial intelligence tools for workflow). Last July, Substack raised US$100m at a $1.1b valuation<\/a> (Icehouse again chipped in $5m).<\/p>\n Those in the cheaper seats include Adrian Macneil, the former Treasury software developer, now relocated to Silicon Valley, who recently raised $40m<\/a> at an undisclosed valuation for his physical world AI start-up Foxglove, Harry Mellsop, whose early stage firm Antioch, which operates in a similar field and recently raised $15m<\/a> at a $102m<\/a> valuation<\/a> and Nic Lane, co-founder of UK AI-training start-up Flower Lab, which raised US$20m at a US$100m valuation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald\u2019s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rise of native AI coding tools like Claude Code has fueled its growth. And these days it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[233967,365,363,364,1975,8613,3595,1288,4037,188804,233964,233969,738,5345,194,7494,1132,111,139,69,17357,2081,11596,1963,1037,233963,145,131,233968,231961,233966,233965,16541,12806,132947,379],"class_list":["post-461464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-837m","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-at","tag-billion","tag-by","tag-capital","tag-coding","tag-cofounded","tag-copplestone","tag-fivetimes","tag-funding","tag-increase","tag-kiwi","tag-less","tag-million","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-paul","tag-raised","tag-raises","tag-series","tag-startup","tag-supabase","tag-technology","tag-than","tag-us10","tag-us10b","tag-us500","tag-us500m","tag-valuation","tag-venture","tag-vibe","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}