It’s no secret that vibe coding — using AI-powered coding tools to build apps and websites via natural language prompts — is exploding in popularity.
In July, Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) just eight months after launch. It plans to close the year at $250 million ARR and thinks it will hit $1 billion ARR within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Replit said earlier this month that its ARR soared from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year.
These companies’ remarkable growth has fueled a wave of competitors, many of which are also quickly gaining momentum. “This is one of those spaces where every company is growing like a weed,” said Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder and general partner at VC firm Footwork.
However, despite their rapid growth, Lovable, Replit, and other vibe-coding startups have a significant shortcoming, argues Basu Trivedi: They excel at developing prototypes but struggle to enable users to launch production-ready software.
The problem with most vibe-coding companies, Basu Trivedi says, is that they don’t provide all the infrastructure that nontechnical users need to launch a functional product.
Anything, an AI app launched a month ago, is attempting to solve this problem by offering all the tools — from databases to storage and payment functionality — that users need to run businesses on the web or to send their vibe-coded creations to the App Store. The company’s initial traction was explosive, reaching $2 million annualized run rate in just two weeks.
Though the vibe-coding market is crowded, the company’s growth rate is so impressive that Basu Trivedi knew he had to fund it.
Anything announced on Monday that it has raised an $11 million financing round at a $100 million valuation, led by Footwork, with additional backing from Uncork, Bessemer, and M13.
Co-founded by former Google colleagues Dhruv Amin and Marcus Lowe, Anything is particularly designed to help nontechnical people generate complete web and mobile applications.
“You haven’t really seen real businesses built on top of any of these tools,” Amin said about other vibe-coding companies. “We want to be the Shopify of the space, where people build apps that make money on top of us.”
Amin claims that users have already leveraged Anything to build fully functional applications available in the AppStore, including a habit tracker, a CPR training course, and a hairstyle “try-on” app. Some of these apps are even starting to make money.
These users, according to Amin, can finish their app in large part because they don’t have to figure out how to set up and connect other essential tools to the prototype generated by the vibe-coding app.
The idea of developing a soup-to-nuts AI-assisted app builder came to Amin and Lowe a little under a year ago. The duo has been working together since 2021. Their first offering was a bootstrapped development marketplace that used AI coding tools in conjunction with human developers. But this was before the rise of LLMs. That business was generating about $2 million in annualized run rate, but it became clear that generative AI could soon deliver apps faster and at lower costs than their marketplace model.
So, in 2023, they shut down that business and started working on developing an AI-powered app-building tool. They even raised some pre-seed and seed funding from Uncork and Bessemer Venture Partners along the way.
Amin and Lowe noticed that most competitive tools, including Lovable and StackBlitz‘s Bolt, rely on the third-party database Supabase. They believed that they could differentiate Anything AI by building all the infrastructure in-house.
That development took time, but it may turn out to be worth the effort because Anything is not the only startup in this market. It’s not even the only one that’s making a bet that offering all the back-end tools can be a big growth driver. Other startups that are building big chunks of their own infrastructure include Mocha and Rork, the latter of which claims to be on track to hit $10 million in ARR by the end of the year.
But the intense competition doesn’t faze Basu Trivedi. “It seems there’s enough demand out there for different types of app-building products,” he said.