Lovable, a Start-Up That Makes Anyone a Coder, Raises $330 Million

The Swedish company is now valued at $6.6 billion, more than triple its $1.8 billion valuation set by investors in July.

From a young age, Anton Osika wanted to build things. That interest drew him to computer programming in high school and to working in start-ups after college in his native Sweden.

Osika doesn’t think he is alone. “Humans were born to build,” he said in a recent interview with DealBook. That belief set in motion Lovable, the Stockholm-based, multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence start-up Osika co-founded in 2023, which allows users with no coding experience to quickly build websites and apps.

Today, Lovable announced that it has raised $330 million in new financing at a $6.6 billion valuation. The funding round was led by both CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, and also includes Khosla Ventures, Accel, EQT and others. And the news comes just a few months after Lovable raised $200 million at a $1.8 billion valuation in July.

Lovable, which Osika founded with Fabian Hedin, is yet another example of the way A.I. is disrupting coding. Since the launch of ChatGPT, programming assistants like Cursor and Cognition have become essential tools for software developers. Lovable is among the companies enabling non-coders to build software, a practice that’s been called “vibecoding.”

“It’s taking this massive market of people that were never developers and turning them into content creators, developers and publishers,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures.

Lovable’s growth has been dramatic since it introduced its latest product late last year. It now has $200 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $100 million in July, and about 320,000 paying customers. Lovable, which is not profitable, offers a free tier of its service as well as a $25 monthly subscription for individuals and a $50 monthly subscription for businesses.

The bulk of Lovable’s customers, Osika said, are founders or entrepreneurs who use the tool to launch new business ideas or to build product lines for existing businesses. The draw for its customers — such as Brickwise, a property management company, or QuickTables, a restaurant sales platform — is time and money. They can produce a website in a matter of hours or days without having to pay a software engineer to build it.

A.I. tools like Lovable have existential ramifications for computer scientists. Why pay a developer when you can use Lovable? Still, Osika is optimistic about the tool’s potential to generate economic growth. One of the metrics he cares most about is the number of daily visitors to Lovable-built apps, of which there are about six million.

“If we can make more of them successful and create more economic opportunities, then I’m going to be very satisfied with the coming 12 months,” he said.

Lovable’s other major customer segment is enterprise customers that use the tool to build prototypes. Conversations with Lovable customers at enterprise companies convinced Laela Sturdy, the CapitalG managing partner who led the deal, of the start-up’s value.

“We talked to several product managers who said in traditional prototyping it would take weeks for them to build, collaborate and actually get a working prototype,” but with Lovable it took them hours, Sturdy said. Klarna, Uber and Deutsche Telekom are among the enterprise companies using Lovable.

The $330 million in new funding will be spent achieving two goals, Osika said. The first is to integrate Lovable with other software providers, such as payment processors like Stripe and document builders like Notion. The second is to improve Lovable’s engineering capabilities so that customers aren’t just making product demos or mock-ups but launching products on Lovable-built software.

“If you’re a new company and you want to build everything on Lovable, that should be 100 percent possible,” Osika said. To achieve that goal, he needs more people. The company expects to double its 120-person team in the next 12 months.

Lovable is in competition with existing web design and prototyping developers, such as Figma and Replit, which are investing heavily in coding products. But the bigger competitive threat may come from the large A.I. companies, like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, that make the models that start-ups like Lovable use as the backbone of their products.

Competing with OpenAI or Google requires building a “beloved layer” of software that can sit on top of the those companies’ models and that customers want to pay for, Murphy said. With Lovable, he added, “the numbers speak for themselves.” At least for now.

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