📍 Austin, TX | 💰 Total Raised: $3.7M | 🎯 Stage: Seed | 🏢 Focus: AI-Native Analytics for Supabase
DreamBase is building the analytics operating center for companies running on Supabase. Co-founded by Andy Keil and Kyle Ledbetter, the company gives AI-native teams instant access to product analytics, dashboards, and business intelligence directly from their Postgres database, with no data team, no BI stack, and no SQL required. They recently closed their $3.7M seed round, led by Felicis, with participation from Active Capital and angel checks from the Supabase CEO and CTO.
Andy breaks down what it actually looks like to build, iterate, and raise as an AI-native founder in 2026 and why the old playbook for all three is being rewritten in real time.
✓ How DreamBase went from whiteboard idea to working prototype in five days
✓ The deliberate friction they added to onboarding and why it converted better
✓ Why Andy led with a Notion memo instead of a pitch deck
✓ How recorded customer conversations replaced traditional social proof
✓ The Saturday pickleball game where the round finally closed
"I still get goosebumps thinking about it. For the first time I was like, whoa, I can be much more effective in this early stage, zero to one, go put something in front of customers." — Andy Keil
Andy wasn't an early adopter of AI tooling. His co-founder Kyle kept pushing him toward it. Then Claude Artifacts came out, and in one afternoon at a coffee shop, Andy built three micro-apps and his whole mental model of what a two-person founding team could do shifted permanently.
That realization is what led them to quit their jobs and start DreamBase. Not because they had a fully formed idea, but because the new building speed made starting a company feel categorically different than it had before. When you can go from concept to customer-facing prototype in five days, the calculus on risk changes.
"We were doing things instantly for users and making it really easy. But people were kind of like, I don't know if I trust it." — Andy Keil
One of the counterintuitive lessons from DreamBase's product journey: they made onboarding too frictionless. Users would connect their Supabase account, DreamBase would pull context and surface a report instantly, and rather than feeling delighted, users felt uneasy. The product was doing too much, too fast, and it was eroding trust.
Their fix was to slow things down deliberately. They added a few small steps where users had to do a bit of work themselves before the AI took over. The result was higher psychological buy-in. Users felt like they'd built something alongside the tool, not just received an output from it. Alex named it on the spot: the IKEA effect.
"The biggest learning I had was how important it was to condense and consolidate the conversations and build urgency and excitement around it." — Andy Keil
Andy's first attempt at raising capital was unstructured. He took meetings as they came, followed intros wherever they led, and didn't architect the process. It didn't work.
The second time, he ran it completely differently. He warmed up investors in the weeks before a major Supabase conference, then stacked all his meetings into a compressed window around the event. He talked to roughly 50 people total, mostly through warm intros from existing relationships. And rather than leading with a slide deck, he sent a Notion memo as a follow-up after conversations, something more comprehensive, embeddable, and in his own voice.
By the time he got on the plane back to Austin, the round was essentially closed. The lead investor called the next morning asking to get in. The lesson isn't just about timing. It's about treating a fundraise like a process you design, not a series of conversations you react to.
"Folks were telling us to raise four. And for me, that kind of broke my brain." — Andy Keil
Andy grew up in the Midwest, not around startup culture. When early investors told him he should raise more than the $2M he was targeting, it felt strange, almost irresponsible. But as he kept having conversations, the logic became clear.
At the seed stage, investors aren't evaluating your current business. They're betting on the size of the company you might become. A small ask can signal a small vision, even unintentionally. When DreamBase raised their sights, the conversations got easier. The round came together faster.
DreamBase: Analytics and dashboards built directly on your Supabase database, no extra stack required.
Supabase: The open-source Firebase alternative Andy and Kyle built DreamBase to sit on top of.
Active Capital: The pre-seed fund that wrote DreamBase's first check and catalyzed the round.
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