Using generative AI to create software has been possibly the largest use case since it first appeared a couple years ago. But platforms like Cursor and Copilot are mostly confined to a world inhabited by trained engineers.
Lovable, a Swedish AI startup, reached the front page of both Product Hunt and Hacker News last year after allowing anyone to create apps very easily, just using prompting. It’s now raised $16 million in a pre-Series A round led by Creandum and revealed some impressive growth figures.
Lovable enables anyone to build what it calls production-ready software without needing coding knowledge. In addition to building prototypes and websites, it’s GPT Engineer can ship fully functional web apps.
It now claims to have 500,000 users who are building over 25,000 new products daily.
As a European alternative to U.S.-based AI coding tools, Lovable says it has now reached $17 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), after scaling to 30,000 paying customers. This would objectively make it one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe.
Lovable reported achieving this milestone with only $2 million in capital expenditure. This, after raising a modest €6.8 million pre-seed funding round last October, led by Hummingbird Ventures and byFounders (an angel syndicate).
Founder Anton Osika told TechCrunch the platform is different to competing AI-driven code-building platforms in that it’s “the best way to get something that actually works.”
He said the platform is using a combination of OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Anthropic, distilled into a platform that can generate the software.
“We’ve seen hundreds of commercial apps built on the platform, at least 25,000,” he said.
Osika — who co-founded Lovable with Fabian Hedin — said he came up with the idea for Lovable when working on Depict.ai in 2023. Depict is formerly a YC-backed company that went on to raise $20 million in investment from Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Northzone, and others. It applies ML in the realm of e-commerce store.
Osika’s previous experience also includes developing the interface for the computer used by world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking and working with ex-SpaceX engineers on wheelchair technology.
“I saw there’s something even larger I can do here, giving the 99% of the population who don’t know how to code access to a software engineer through AI,” Osika told TechCrunch.
Lovable now plans to expand its integration with third-party services, including Supabase for databases and GitHub for code storage.
In a statement, Fredrik Cassel, general partner at Creandum, said: “I haven’t seen this level of user love for a product since we invested in Spotify. It’s truly astounding. Lovable has the potential to become one of Europe’s next generational companies in this new era of AI.”
Also in the funding round were angel investors, including Charlie Songhurst (Meta board), Adam D’Angelo and Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), and Eric Bernhardsson (Modal).
