---
name: Cofounder
title: Cofounder builds autonomous companies on Supabase
description: >-
  Cofounder gives every customer an entire engineering, sales, marketing,
  support, and product team made of agents. Supabase for Platforms gives
  Cofounder the database platform to run an entire software company on every
  customer's behalf, from day one.
company_url: 'https://cofounder.co'
industry:
  - ai
  - developer-tools
region: North America
company_size: startup
supabase_products:
  - database
  - auth
  - storage
  - realtime
  - platforms
date: '2026-05-04'
---
> Imagine on Thursday evening, you have a business idea, and by end of day Friday, you have an
> actual business set up with everything from infrastructure to sales to marketing. Supabase helps
> us deliver on this vision for our customers.
>
> *— Andrew Pignanelli, CEO, Cofounder*

[Cofounder](https://cofounder.co) is the main product of General Intelligence, an applied AI lab in New York founded by Andrew Pignanelli and Abhishyant Khare in January 2025. Their mission is to enable the one-person, one-billion-dollar company. It is a single platform where agents run engineering, sales and marketing, customer support, and product, all coordinated by a top-level CEO agent that talks directly to the human owner.

## The challenge

A real software company needs more than a coding agent. It needs a database. It needs auth. It needs storage. It needs a safe way to ship changes. And it needs every agent in the company to share the same source of truth so they do not stomp on each other.

Most AI builders today solve only one slice of this. A coding agent. A support agent. A marketing agent. The hard part is the wiring. Cofounder calls the answer to that problem "super-optimization": agents that plan with each other, escalate to each other, and escalate to the human at the top.

For Cofounder, the customer experience had to be agent-driven from the very first click. Asking a non-technical founder to sign up for Supabase, then Vercel, then GitHub, and stitch them together by hand would not be a great onboarding.

> 5 minutes on Supabase, then 5 minutes on Vercel, then 5 minutes on GitHub. You can see how this
> becomes infeasible.
>
> *— Abhishyant Khare, CTO, Cofounder*

## Why they chose Supabase

Andrew was already a Supabase user before General Intelligence existed. He had taught himself to build applications in the fall of 2024 and reached for Supabase the same way most builders do.

> I was learning how to build applications in September of 2024. How do I get a database set up? How
> do I do auth? Supabase was the pretty much no-brainer answer.
>
> *— Andrew Pignanelli, CEO, Cofounder*

When the team started designing the new Cofounder, the question got bigger. They had to give every future customer their own production-grade backend, not just use one for themselves. They evaluated other hosted Postgres alternatives and looked at other auth options. They kept coming back to one thing: Supabase already had [Database](/database), [Auth](/auth), [Storage](/storage), and [Realtime](/realtime) in a single product. Supabase for Platforms exposed all of it through a multi-tenant API.

There was one missing piece. Andrew wanted every Cofounder customer to get the same Supabase dashboard experience that a direct Supabase customer gets.

> I want every user to have a Supabase instance that looks like ours, the same experience you get as
> a fully fledged user. No one could really deliver on that, but Supabase did.
>
> *— Andrew Pignanelli, CEO, Cofounder*

## The solution

When a customer signs up for Cofounder, the platform provisions a Supabase project, a GitHub repo, and a Vercel project, all wired together. Postgres is the source of truth. Supabase Auth handles users. Storage holds files. Realtime carries live updates. The customer can open the Supabase dashboard at any time and see exactly what the agents see. The team uses Supabase the same way internally, with the General Intelligence application itself running on Supabase database and auth.

The interesting part is what happens when an agent needs to change the database. Cofounder does not let agents run migrations through a tool call. Every customer gets two environments out of the box, staging and production, and every schema change has to flow through a pull request. The lints run, the PR has to pass, and only then does it merge. One lint blocks tables from being created without Row Level Security. Another blocks PRs that delete old migration files and leave the database in a bad state. Standard engineering practice, encoded so an agent cannot forget.

Each PR with a migration also gets a Supabase preview branch. The agent applies the change there, runs it against a fork of the customer's database, and only merges once it has proof the change is safe. Cofounder runs Supabase locally inside each agent's sandbox as well, so the agent can rehearse a migration before opening the PR at all. Branch, change, test, merge. The way a careful engineer works.

> Branchable Postgres on Supabase made a lot of sense here. To test a database change, you want to
> fork your existing database with the new change, see if that breaks things, and then iterate from
> there.
>
> *— Abhishyant Khare, CTO, Cofounder*

Uniformity makes the rest of the system possible. Every Cofounder customer gets the same shape of project: GitHub plus Vercel plus Supabase. That sameness lets the team load every agent with skills once and have them work for every customer. The agents know how the pieces fit together because the pieces are always the same.

The team also built a deliberate exit door. Customers can graduate off Cofounder and take their Supabase project with them. That is a philosophical choice. The team wants Cofounder customers to run real businesses, and a real business eventually needs to own its own backend.

> If you want to get 10,000 users on something and have it be secure, you need a sophisticated
> platform to run your backend. If you want to start a real business and turn it into a startup and
> sell it for a billion dollars, you're going to need control over your own database at some point.
>
> *— Andrew Pignanelli, CEO, Cofounder*

The new Cofounder also adds per-tenant infrastructure to support a real business at scale. All of this is possible because of Supabase, and Supabase for Platforms.

> Building all of this on our own would have probably taken months and 3 to 4 additional engineering
> hires. We would have had to solve the same problems Supabase has already solved, over and over
> again.
>
> *— Abhishyant Khare, CTO, Cofounder*

For the customer, the result is the experience itself. The agent sets up the entire backend. The dashboard is there if they want it. The graduation path is there if they want it. The product just runs.

## What's next

Cofounder wants to make the 400 million existing businesses, and a billion future ones, agent-native. Over the next 12 months the team is adding incorporation, mobile apps, and e-commerce, so anyone can start a real company on the platform. The plan is to grow into tens of millions of businesses over the next few years.

> We don't want to go out and build infrastructure for hosted databases. We want to build companies.
> The whole reason we build on Supabase is so that we can keep doing that and not have to worry
> about infrastructure.
>
> *— Andrew Pignanelli, CEO, Cofounder*

The team's advice to other founders building agent platforms is simple: do not put the setup work on the user.

> You need to make sure the setup experience is handled by agents and not your users. A user
> shouldn't have to go in and configure a bunch of stuff. The Supabase dashboard is meant for
> humans, but your user shouldn't see an empty one from zero. Your agent should figure that out.
> Managed and then graduate is the right strategy.
>
> *— Andrew Pignanelli, CEO, Cofounder*