Jason M. Lemkin breaks down why Supabase's $10 billion valuation makes sense. The company built tooling that lets AI agents automatically spin up Postgres databases, and there's been an order-of-magnitude surge in databases created by agents versus humans. Since Supabase charges per database, the explosion in automated deployments creates a clear revenue stream.
Superbase at $10 billion. Jason, you're the man for this. The man who's used more instances than anyone else. Is Superbase at $10 billion a good buy? How do we feel?
I think I like it. I mean, I do think it's an interesting buy. First of all, huge credit to the team. I mean, this is one I call an AI tailwind to the maximum. Superbase founded, I think, in 2020, right? This is pre-AI. And they're like, oh, well, we'll do another fork of Postgres, which is open source and free, and we'll make it easier to use and easier to deploy. I mean, who the hell— I mean, I know it was, it was a hot YC company, which kind of, you know, a lot of folks want to say it's the unhot ones that take off. But, you know, sometimes it is the hot ones. But I don't know that that— I don't know that certainly wouldn't have been obvious to me in 2020 that we needed another forked version of an open source database process. I mean, everyone was having issues with Postgres at the low end and the high end. Folks were having to shard it and it got complicated for big and it was, it was reasonably difficult to deploy at the low end. So their idea, but then that just worked with agents. Like they built a product that could basically self-deploy a Postgres database and it's what every agentic product needed, right? They needed to spool up a database without humans and they leaned the hell into it, right? They let, they didn't get Replit. Replit went with Neon, which Databricks bought, but everyone else standardized on Supabase, right? They supported them and then they let everyone, Lovable, Emergent and all these other ones white-labeled it a couple months ago. And now I don't have the exact numbers, but I know more databases are being created by agents than humans. So that is the trend you're betting on. All right. Database is a fundamental category of software. It always has been. Right now, the number of databases we're creating, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an order of magnitude more than it's been 12 months ago. So why the hell wouldn't you want to bet on the leader in that trend? Right? Every app needs a database. Like every, and even the ones— and what's interesting now is I'm not sure if this is true of Laravel v0, but Replit changed it a little while ago where every single app has a database whether you use it or not. They found that enough of them are using databases no matter what they build, right, that it's not worth adding a database later. So whether you even realize you have a database, all the millions and millions and millions of live coded apps have a database in the background. So, and with Supabase, they get to monetize them all. Like, they're charging these guys for every single database. So I do like this one.
