Lovable: Swedish AI 'Vibe Coding' Startup Achieves Unicorn Status with $200M Series A

Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch | TechCrunch

Fast-growing Swedish AI vibe coding startup Lovable has become Europe's latest unicorn. Only eight months since its launch, the startup has raised a $200 million Series A round led by Accel at a $1.8 billion valuation. Like Cursor and other platforms that help developers write code and build apps by harnessing the coding and reasoning abilities of large language models, Stockholm-based Lovable helps people use natural language to create websites and apps. The startup's trajectory so far has charted straight towards the sky, with the company claiming it now has more than 2.3 million active users. Those users are using Lovable for free, to be clear, but in a recent talk, the startup's CEO Anton Osika said it now has more than 180,000 paying subscribers, and the company had reached annual recurring revenues of $75 million in seven months. That traction likely contributed to this oversized Series A. The Series A saw participation from existing investors, which include 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird, and Visionaries Club. In February, Creandum led a $15 million pre-series A round in the company, which at the time said it had reached annual recurring revenue of $17 million and had 30,000 paying customers. The startup has managed this hockey-stick growth with a pretty sparse team of only 45 full-time employees. That's almost as many as the high-profile angel investors who it said participated in this round, including Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski; Remote CEO Job van der Voort; Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield; and Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah.

Lovable, A Swedish AI Vibe Coding Startup, Becomes Unicorn With $200M Series A

Swedish AI vibe coding startup Lovable has raised $200 million in a Series A round of funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, making it Europe's newest unicorn, according to TechCrunch. The raise, led by Accel, comes just eight months after the startup's launch. Founded in 2023, Lovable has to date raised about $224 million in funding. Existing backers 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird Ventures and Visionaries Club also participated in its latest financing. In December 2024, CEO and co-founder Anton Osika posted on X that the company was "the fastest growing startup in Europe ever," having reached $4 million in ARR in four weeks. In February, the startup raised $15 million in a round led by Creandum. At that time, the company said it had reached $17 million in annual recurring revenue and had over 30,000 paying customers. "Lovable isn't just about writing code -- it's about making software creation accessible to everyone," it said at the time. Vibe coding is a hot space, pulling in massive rounds of funding globally. In June, San Francisco-based Anysphere, which sells the popular AI coding assistant Cursor, confirmed it raised a $900 million round at a staggering $9.9 billion valuation. Accel also participated in that round. Lovable appears to be focused more on the nontechnical user while Anysphere is targeting the enterprise. Europe funding boost The raise is a good start to the third quarter for Europe. Overall, funding to startups in the region settled in Q2, coming in flat quarter over quarter, but down 24% from the peak second quarter in 2024, Crunchbase data shows. A total of $12.6 billion was raised by around 1,200 startups across Europe last quarter, with funding amounts comparable with the previous two quarters. And for the first time since 2012, Germany-based startups jumped ahead of the United Kingdom by amounts invested in a quarter.

Lovable Becomes AI Unicorn with $200 Million Series A Led by Accel in Less than 8 Months | AIM

"Today, there are 47M developers worldwide. Lovable is going to produce 1B potential builders." Stockholm-based AI startup Lovable has raised $200 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel, pushing its valuation to $1.8 billion. The announcement comes just eight months after the company's launch. Lovable allows users to build websites and apps using natural language prompts, similar to platforms like Cursor. The company claims over 2.3 million active users, with more than 180,000 of them now paying subscribers. The latest round saw participation from existing backers, including 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird, and Visionaries Club. In February, Creandum led a $15 million pre-Series A investment when Lovable had 30,000 paying customers and $17 million in ARR, having spent only $2 million. The company currently operates with a team of 45 full-time employees. The Series A round also attracted a long list of angel investors, including Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Remote CEO Job van der Voort, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, and HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah. Most of Lovable's users are non-technical individuals building prototypes that are later developed further with engineering support. According to a press release, more than 10 million projects have been created on the platform to date. Osika said the company is not targeting existing developers but a new category of users entirely. "99% of the world's best ideas are trapped in the heads of people who can't code. They have problems. They know the solutions. They just can't build them." Lovable is also being used by enterprises such as Klarna and HubSpot, and its leadership sees the platform evolving into a tool for building full-scale production applications. "Every day, brilliant founders and operators with game-changing ideas hit the same wall: they don't have a developer to realise their vision quickly and easily," Osika said in a statement. Osika also said on X that he has become an angel investor in a software startup built using Lovable. In another recent example, Osika noted that a Brazilian edtech company built an app using Lovable that generated $3 million in 48 hours. Lovable's growth trajectory suggests increased adoption among both individual users and enterprise customers, positioning it as a significant player in the growing AI-powered software creation market.

AI vibe coding startup Lovable raises $200M at $1.8B valuation - SiliconANGLE

Swedish artificial intelligence software development startup Lovable Labs Inc. today announced it raised $200 million in a Series A round that values the company at $1.8 billion. Founded in 2023, the company's product allows software developers to rapidly prototype and build websites and apps using a method called "vibe coding," an AI-assisted development approach where developers use natural language to instruct AI tools to generate, refine and debug code. It emphasizes fast, improvisational and iterative experimentation that relies heavily on AI for code completion. Accel led the round. The company's existing investors, 20VC, ByFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird and Visionaries Club, also participated in the round. It comes just six months after the company raised $15 million in pre-Series A funding in February. In a recent talk, Lovable's Chief Executive Anton Osika said the company now exceeds 180,000 paying subscribers and reached annual recurring revenues of $75 million in seven months. The company provides numerous tools for developers, with a focus on non-technical users, providing them with everything they need to go from idea to working application quickly. The company's website tagline is "Build something Lovable." A user needs only start by typing an idea into the website's chatbox to begin their journey, which can also take uploads of images, documents, flowcharts and more. Slightly more technical users can also import their work from Figma, a cloud-based design and prototyping tool for creating user interfaces and user experiences, to provide the AI tool with a framework to build the logic behind their application. Apps built by the community can be developed privately or displayed publicly. This allows other users to borrow, remix and reuse the code generated in those projects in their work. Some examples include a Quick Response code generator, an invoice template generator and the "Engine Arcade" that can create video games from just a prompt. Lovable also recently launched an agentic AI capability in beta mode at the tail end of June. Agent Mode allows Lovable to think, plan and take actions automatically on behalf of the user, meaning that the user can provide a full specification document of their intent for the application and let Lovable build parts of their project. It is part of a new series of capabilities that will search the codebase of the user to extract files, functions and components to use, read files to understand app structure, inspect logs and debug errors on its own and run web searches to fetch documentation, content and images - and even edit them on demand. Lovable said that it will essentially act like a software developer. Currently, Agent Mode can be used for simple requests, such as writing straightforward functions for projects, or more complex requests, such as building complex features, all without needing a lot of interactivity or hand-holding.