Lovable Surges to Nearly 8 Million Users as AI Coding Platform Targets Non-Technical Market

Lovable says it's nearing 8 million users as the year-old AI coding startup eyes more corporate employees | TechCrunch

Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is closing in on 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a sit-down on Monday, a major jump from the 2.3 million active users number the company shared in July. Osika said the company -- which was founded almost exactly one year ago -- is also seeing "100,000 new products built on Lovable every single day." The metrics suggest rapid growth of the startup, which has raised $228 million in total funding to date, including a $200 million round this summer that valued the company at $1.8 billion. Rumors have swirled in recent weeks -- potentially sparked by its own investors -- that new backers want to invest at a $5 billion valuation, though Osika said the company isn't capital constrained and declined to discuss fundraising plans. Speaking to me on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, Osika notably didn't share another number: Lovable's current annual recurring revenue. The company hit $100 million in ARR this June, a milestone it trumpeted publicly. But questions have emerged since about whether the vibe coding boom is sustainable. Research from Barclays this summer, along with Google Trends data, showed that traffic to some of the buzziest services, including Lovable and Vercel's v0, had declined after peaking earlier this year. (Traffic to Lovable was down 40% as of September, according to the Barclays analysts.) "This waning traffic begs the question on whether app/site vibecoding has peaked out already or has just had a bit of a lull before interest ramps up," they reportedly wrote in a note to investors. Still, Osika insisted retention remains strong, citing more than 100% net dollar retention -- meaning users' spend more over time. He also said the company has "just passed" the 100-employee mark and is now importing leadership talent from San Francisco to bolster its Stockholm headquarters. Lovable emerged from GPT Engineer, an open-source tool Osika built that went viral among developers. But he says he quickly realized the bigger opportunity lay with the 99% of people who don't know how to code. "I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and I realized, look, we're going to reimagine how you build software," Osika said. "I biked to my co-founder's place, and I said, I have this great idea. I woke him up." The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies are using Lovable to "supercharge creativity," according to Osika. At the same time, he said, an 11-year-old in Lisbon built a Facebook clone for his school, while a Swedish duo is making $700,000 annually from a startup they launched seven months ago on the platform. "What I hear from people trying Lovable is, 'It just works,'" Osika said, crediting what he described as Swedish design sensibility. Security remains a thornier issue for the vibe coding sector. When I raised a recent incident in which an app built with vibe coding tools leaked 72,000 images into the wild, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem. "The part of the engineering organization where we're moving the quickest on hiring is security engineers," he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable "more secure than building with just human-written code." In fact, he said, before users can deploy, Lovable now runs multiple security checks, though the platform still requires users building sensitive applications -- banking apps, for instance -- to hire security experts, just as they would with traditional development. Osika was similarly matter-of-fact when I asked about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI giants whose models power Lovable but that have also released their own coding agents. He sees the market as big enough for multiple winners. "If we can unlock more human creativity and human agency . . . and just driving the change so that anyone can create if they have good ideas, [and] build businesses on top of that, that should be celebrated, regardless of whoever does that." It's a decidedly collegial stance in an industry not known for it, though Osika has engaged in some light social media sparring with Amjad Masad of competitor Replit. Still, he said, his focus remains on building "the most intuitive experience for humans" rather than obsessing over rivals. Osika described Lovable's mission as building "the last piece of software" -- a platform where everything a product organization needs, from understanding users to deploying mission-critical features, can be done through a simple interface. "Demo, don't memo," a popular phrase among product leaders, captures how companies now use Lovable, he said. Employees can now quickly prototype ideas rather than writing long presentations, then test them with early users before committing resources. For all the hypergrowth and investor attention, Osika -- dressed simply in a beige T-shirt and matching button-down, floppy hair framing his face -- appeared very much at ease. The 30-something former particle physicist, who was the first employee at Sauna Labs before founding Lovable, has gone from open-source developer to venture-backed founder to must-have conference guest in rapid succession. Yet he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than dwelling on his company's trajectory. "What I care about is that everyone who's at the company, they're mission driven, they really care about what they're doing and how we as a team succeed," he said, pushing back against Silicon Valley's intensifying hustle culture. "The best people in my team today, most of them, they have kids, and they really, really care about what we're doing. They're not working 12 hours, six days a week." Though he added: "Although it's a startup, so they're probably working more than most jobs."

Lovable surges toward 8 million users after $200 million funding round

Users now build 100,000 new products per day on Lovable, according to Osika's remarks at Web Summit Lisbon. Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is "closing in on 8 million users," CEO Anton Osika said on Monday during an appearance at the Web Summit event in Lisbon. This marks a substantial jump from the 2.3 million active users the company reported in July. Osika, who founded the company just over a year ago, also stated that users are building "100,000 new products on Lovable every single day." This rapid user growth follows a $200 million funding round this summer that valued Lovable at $1.8 billion. Amid rumors of new investor interest at a potential $5 billion valuation, Osika declined to discuss fundraising plans. However, the CEO did not provide an updated annual recurring revenue (ARR) figure, which the company last announced as $100 million in June. This omission comes as questions have emerged about the sustainability of the "vibe coding" boom. Research from Barclays this summer noted that traffic to Lovable had declined 40% as of September after peaking earlier in the year. Osika countered concerns of a slowdown by citing strong retention, claiming the company has "more than 100% net dollar retention," meaning existing customers are spending more over time. He also noted the company has "just passed" the 100-employee mark and is importing leadership talent from San Francisco. The platform, which originated from Osika's viral open-source tool GPT Engineer, is now used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies, according to Osika, as well as by individual creators. When questioned about security -- a major issue for the sector following a recent data leak from a "vibe coding" app -- Osika acknowledged the problem. "The part of the engineering organization where we're moving the quickest on hiring is security engineers," he said. He stated that Lovable now runs multiple security checks before users can deploy an app, but still requires users building sensitive applications, such as for banking, to hire their own security experts. Regarding competition from AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose models Lovable uses, Osika said he sees the market as "big enough for multiple winners" and that he is focused on building "the most intuitive experience for humans."

Our mission is to empower the 99% who can't code: Lovable cofounder - The Economic Times

Mountain View: Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Lovable is positioning itself differently in the crowded coding-assist segment, instead of targeting software engineers, it is focusing on people with little or no technical background. Founded in 2023, the startup allows users to describe what they want in simple language, like a landing page, dashboard or prototype, and lets the platform generate code in real time. "Most of the current players assume you are already a developer," Fabian Hedin, Lovable's cofounder and chief technology officer, told ET in an interview on the sidelines of an AI event at tech firm Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. "Our product is designed for people who have ideas but not coding skills. You can just describe your vision, and within minutes, something tangible is built for you," he said. Lovable's approach differs from the growing pack of AI-powered coding assistants, from Microsoft's GitHub Copilot and Cursor to Replit. While these products are built to help programmers work faster, Lovable aims at a much wider base -- people with no technical background. Also Read: AI 'vibe coding' startups burst onto scene with sky-high valuations "It's a very obvious thing to apply AI to empower developers," Hedin said. "Our mission has always been to let the 99% who cannot code build the same things as software developers. We want to make software creation as accessible as writing a document or recording a video." Lovable launched its current version in November 2024, after experimenting with several early prototypes. In July 2025, it raised $200 million in its first round of funding, led by Silicon Valley venture capital fund Accel, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. The Financial Times reported in August that the Swedish startup was in talks to raise another round of financing at a $4billion valuation. In August, via a company blog post, Lovable's cofounder and CEO Anton Osika said it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just eight months since hitting $1 million. "This makes us the fastest-growing startup, not just in Europe, but in the world. People have built more than 10 million projects on Lovable, and are currently building 100,000 per day. And we're just getting started," Osika added. The company's users are spread across the US, South America, Asia and Europe, though its engineering and product teams remain based in Stockholm, Sweden. "We don't separate growth strategies by region," Hedin said. "People build something and share it with others -- that's what drives adoption. When someone creates a project and sends it to a friend or posts it online, that network effect becomes our marketing." Hedin said the user base is diverse. "We've seen teenagers using Lovable to build games for fun, employees in companies building dashboards for their teams, and solo founders launching small businesses," he said. "That's what excites us, seeing creativity being unlocked in unexpected places. We help people outside engineering, marketing teams, for instance, bring ideas to life without waiting on developers." Vibe coding: crowded space The market for AI-assisted coding, popularly called "vibe coding", is becoming one of the most active corners of the startup ecosystem. Larger technology firms such as OpenAI and Google are also moving closer to the application layer, potentially overlapping with smaller startups that depend on their models. Hedin said Lovable was comfortable operating at the application layer rather than trying to build foundation models. "We're in a good position because there's healthy competition between open and closed-source model providers, and they're focused on the infrastructure layer. We sit comfortably on the application layer, and that competition benefits us," he said. He added that Lovable's current focus is on refining its product experience rather than entering new markets or categories. "When people describe what they want and Lovable gets it right the first time, that's when they realise the power of AI in creation," he said. "Expanding too fast before that experience is perfect would be premature." While Silicon Valley remains the hub for AI development, Europe's ecosystem is strengthening quickly, he said. The quality of local talent has improved markedly over the past two years. You don't necessarily need to move to San Francisco to build, Hedin said, adding, "The depth of AI talent in Europe has improved dramatically, especially in cities like Stockholm, Berlin and Paris." Lovable currently has no immediate plans to open offices in Asia, though users there form a growing share of its base, he said. Anthropic CEO recently said that AI will write 90% of the code in a few months and in a year, AI will write essentially all of the code. But is the same adoption expected from non-technical users? Hedin acknowledged that awareness is still limited among the larger set of people. "The non-technical market is actually much larger, 99% of the world, as I said... It's not as clearly defined yet, but the demand is strong, and people are willing to pay once they see what they can do. Everything from kids making games to enterprise teams building internal tools, prototypes, or even full-fledged products. Some users are building entire startups and earning a living from it," he said.