Paul Copplestone

CEO, Supabase

Gonzalo Mocorrea

Partner, Accel

Arun Mathew

Partner, Accel

Paul Copplestone didn't think things like this actually happened. VCs showing up at your doorstep unannounced, 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, in a town most people have never heard of. That's the stuff of startup mythology. Except this time, it was fucking real. And it was about to get weirder.

It started with a text. Gonzalo Mocorrea, a partner at Accel, asked Copplestone for his New Zealand address. Not his email. Not a Zoom link. His actual, physical address in Wānaka—a small town on New Zealand's South Island, famous for its mirror-like lake, snow-capped mountains, and approximately zero venture capitalists.

A few days later, Mocorrea showed up at his door.

To understand how absurd this is, you need to understand where Wānaka is. It's not Auckland. It's not even Wellington. It's a town of about 15,000 people tucked into the Southern Alps, accessible only by flying into Queenstown and then driving another hour through mountain roads. The kind of place you go to escape the world. Not the kind of place that receives unsolicited visits from Sand Hill Road.

But Mocorrea wasn't there for the scenery. He was there because Supabase—the open-source database company Copplestone co-founded with Ant Wilson in 2020—had become impossible to ignore. Over 81,000 GitHub stars. Two million developers. The backend of choice for the entire "vibe coding" movement. And Copplestone was running it all from a lakeside town at the bottom of the world.

For the next two days, Mocorrea would "pop in" to chat. Not formally. Not with a pitch deck or a term sheet. Just... conversations. About Postgres. About open source. About what Copplestone wanted to build.

The thing is, Supabase wasn't fucking fundraising. They had raised $80 million just seven months earlier. They were, in Copplestone's words, "default alive"—profitable enough to survive indefinitely without another round. Most founders would kill for that position. Most VCs wouldn't fly 7,000 miles to disturb it.

Mocorrea was not most VCs.

On day three, he made a call.

Arun Mathew, another Accel partner, started booking flights. When Copplestone found out, his response was immediate.

Mathew's trip would take more than 24 hours. Two flights. Multiple time zones. A car ride through the Southern Alps. All to join a dinner meeting with a founder who explicitly said he wasn't interested in raising.

They met in Queenstown. Beautiful place. Mountains everywhere. The kind of restaurant where you can see glaciers from your table. Over dinner, they talked about the company's trajectory. About what $200 million could do. About Supabase's vision to become the default backend for every developer on earth.

The next morning, they caught up again. And then:

Copplestone took the deal. Not because he needed the money—he didn't. But because, as he later explained, the economics made sense. More capital meant more free-tier databases. More free databases meant more developers. More developers meant more eventual customers. The flywheel would spin faster.

Four months later, Supabase raised another $100 million Series E—this time at a $5 billion valuation. That's $380 million raised in a single year. A 500%+ valuation step-up from the Series C. They'd become the vibe-coding generation's backend of choice, powering tools like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor, and Claude Code.

And in a move that would make every open-source purist weep tears of joy, they let community members buy stock as part of the Series E. Because when you've got 4 million developers and 430,000+ community members, you share the fucking upside.

Every great story has details that don't fit the main narrative but are too good to leave out. The Wānaka Incident is no fucking exception.