Lovable

Overview

Lovable is the Stockholm AI company that turned a viral open-source side project into what independent tech press calls Europe’s fastest-growing software company ever. Founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, it sells a “vibe coding” platform: users describe what they want in plain language and the platform writes, deploys and hosts the working app — no engineer required (Reuters). By September 2026 the company said it had crossed a $600 million annualized revenue run rate and was valued at $13.3 billion, with backing from Menlo Ventures, Alphabet’s growth fund CapitalG, Accel and EQT’s EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund (TechCrunch; TechCrunch). Its ascent has been shadowed by two things the funding headlines rarely dwell on: independent research questioning whether vibe-coding demand is sustainable, and a documented security incident involving apps built on its platform (TechCrunch; UpGuard).

A weekend build becomes a company

The Lovable story starts with GPT Engineer, an open-source tool Osika built over a few weekends in spring 2023 to prove that the first ChatGPT API could already power an agent that writes code. It shot to the top of GitHub’s trending page, and Osika decided the bigger opportunity was the 99% of people who don’t code. “I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and I realized, look, we’re going to reimagine how you build software,” he told TechCrunch. “I biked to my co-founder’s place, and I said, I have this great idea. I woke him up” (TechCrunch).

The commercial arc was fast. Osika recruited Hedin — a former colleague — as co-founder and CTO, and Hummingbird provided $8 million in seed funding in October 2023 (VnExpress International). The commercial Lovable product launched in November 2024, and the revenue curve that followed was extreme: $100 million in ARR eight months after launch, which Sifted noted made it the fastest-growing software company on record by that measure (VnExpress International; Sifted). The founders are unusual for the AI era: Osika is a former particle physicist who was the first employee at AI company Sana Labs, and he has publicly pushed back on Silicon Valley hustle culture, arguing his Stockholm team succeeds without 12-hour days (TechCrunch). Both founders have pledged 50% of their eventual exit earnings to charity through the Founders Pledge (VnExpress International).

Hypergrowth, then the enterprise turn

The funding cadence tells the growth story in compressed form. In July 2025 Lovable raised a $200 million Series A led by Accel at a $1.8 billion valuation — the same month it reported $100 million ARR and 2.3 million active users (Sifted). A December 2025 round of $330 million led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures — with Nvidia’s NVentures and the venture arms of Salesforce, Databricks and Atlassian joining — quadrupled the valuation to $6.6 billion in under six months (Reuters). Then, in August 2026, $400 million more at $13.3 billion, co-led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT — the EU-backed vehicle explicitly created to keep European scaleups on the continent (TechCrunch).

The strategic shift has been from hobbyists to enterprises. By late 2025 the company said more than half of Fortune 500 companies’ employees were using the platform “to supercharge creativity” — from an 11-year-old in Lisbon building a school Facebook clone to a Swedish duo making $700,000 a year from a startup built on Lovable (TechCrunch). By September 2026, co-founder Hedin claimed people at two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies were using it, with named customers including Microsoft, Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom, and nearly a billion monthly visits to user-built apps (TechCrunch). Technically, Lovable now offers its own in-house trained AI model alongside frontier models, and in June 2026 it signed a multiyear Google Cloud deal described as a fivefold increase in usage — notable because the product itself builds on models from OpenAI and Anthropic, per Osika’s interview with The Times (TechCrunch; VnExpress International).

The questions traveling with the growth

Two independent checks complicate the booster narrative. First, Barclays research in summer 2025 showed traffic to Lovable down 40% as of September 2025, alongside similar declines for rivals like Vercel’s v0 — raising the question of whether vibe coding had peaked or was merely pausing before another leg up (TechCrunch). Osika countered that net dollar retention exceeded 100%, meaning users spend more over time, but declined to share current ARR onstage at Web Summit (TechCrunch).

Second, the security record. In March 2025, a researcher reported widespread misconfiguration of the Supabase databases behind Lovable-built apps — databases lacking the access controls that would stop any user from querying them — an incident tracked as CVE-2025-48757 and later documented in UpGuard’s large-scale study of Supabase exposure (UpGuard). Osika has acknowledged the problem is structural to the category: apps built by non-engineers ship fast but skip the permission layer. He told TechCrunch that security engineers are the part of Lovable’s engineering organization being hired fastest, that multiple security checks now run before deployment, and that his goal is to make building with Lovable “more secure than building with just human-written code” — while conceding that sensitive applications, like banking apps, still need human security experts (TechCrunch).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not present Lovable’s revenue, user, project or traffic figures as audited fact — all are company-reported and stated as such, and the $300M vs $330M discrepancy in the December 2025 round shows why contemporary wire reporting is preferred. It does not assert the founders’ exact ownership percentages or net worths beyond Forbes’ estimates. It does not take a position on whether vibe-coding demand is durable; it reports both the growth claims and Barclays’ contrary data. It does not detail Lovable’s proprietary model technology, which the company has not publicly documented in citable independent sources. Finally, the profile identifies the Stockholm company precisely — it is not affiliated with any other small commercial uses of the word “Lovable.”