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 toward 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 millio 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, with “just $2 million spent.“
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.
Most of Lovable’s traction seems to come from non-technical users, who use it to create prototypes that they can collaborate on later with developers to build more fleshed-out apps and websites. This, and tests, are likely the bulk of the 10 million projects that have been created on the platform to date, the company said in a press release.
But Lovable also envisions itself becoming a tool that can be used to create production-grade applications that underpin full-fledged businesses.
“Every day, brilliant founders and operators with game-changing ideas hit the same wall: they don’t have a developer to realize their vision quickly and easily,” Osika said in a statement.
Notably, Osika recently said on X that he is now an angel investor in a software startup that was ostensibly built with Lovable. (Going by some clues on the post, that startup seems to be ad-testing platform Stardust — we’ve reached out to Startdust’s founder for confirmation, but haven’t heard back.)
Osika also celebrated that an app made by a large Brazilian edtech company using Lovable had grossed $3 million in 48 hours. This could present another growth avenue for Lovable, which has already managed to acquire enterprise customers, including Klarna and HubSpot.
