lovablea Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is approaching 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a session on Monday, a big jump from the 2.3 million active users the company shared in July. The company — which was founded about a year ago — is also seeing “100,000 new products built on Lovable every day,” Osika said.
Metrics point to rapid growth for the startup, which has raised $228 million in total funding to date, including a $200 million round this summer that values the company at $1.8 billion. Rumors have circulated in recent weeks — perhaps sparked by its investors — that new backers want a $5 billion investment, though Osika said the company was not tied up in its capital and declined to discuss fundraising plans.
While speaking with me on stage at a Web Summit event in Lisbon, Osika did mention another number: Lovable’s current annual recurring revenue. The company, which uses a mix of free and paid tiers, reached $100 million in ARR in June, a milestone it shared publicly. But questions have since emerged about whether the coding boom is sustainable.
research from Barclays this summer, along with Google Trends data, showed that traffic to some of the most popular services, including Lovable and Vercel’s v0, had declined after peaking earlier this year. (Traffic to Lovable was down 40% as of September, according to Barclays analysts.) “This decline in traffic begs the question of whether app/site vibrating coding has already peaked or has seen a bit of a lull before interest picks up,” it said in a note to investors.
However, Osika said product retention remains strong, citing more than 100% net dollar retention — meaning users are spending more over time. He also said the company “just passed” the 100-employee mark and is now importing leadership talent from San Francisco to bolster its Stockholm headquarters.
Lovable emerged from GPT Engineer, an open source tool designed by Osika that has spread very quickly among developers. But he says he quickly realized that the biggest opportunity lay with the 99% of people who didn’t know how to code. “I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and realized we were going to reimagine how we build software,” Osika said. “I biked to my co-founder’s house and said, ‘I have this great idea.’ I woke him up.”
The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies use Lovable to “boost creativity,” according to Osika. Meanwhile, he said, an 11-year-old in Lisbon built a version of Facebook for his school, while a Swedish duo is making $700,000 a year from a startup they launched seven months ago on the platform.
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“What I hear from people who try Lovable is that it works,” Osika said, praising what he described as Swedish design sensibility.
Security remains a thorny issue for the biometric industry. When I brought up a recent incident where an app built using dynamic coding tools leaked 72,000 images to the internet, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem.
“The part where we’re moving fastest in terms of hiring in the engineering organization is security engineers,” he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable “more secure than building with just human-written code.” In fact, he said, before users can publish, Lovable now runs multiple security checks, though the platform still requires users creating sensitive apps — banking apps, for example — to hire security experts, just as they do with traditional development.
Osika was similarly matter-of-fact when I asked him about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the two AI giants whose models power Lovable, but which have also launched programming agents of their own. He believes the market is big enough for a number of winners. “If we can unleash more human creativity and human agency… and drive change so that anyone can innovate if they have good ideas, [and] Building a business on top of that should be celebrated, no matter who is doing it.”
It’s certainly a collective attitude in an industry not known for it. (Even Osika chimed in in some light Social media sparring With Amjad Massad of rival Rebelite.) But he said his focus now is on building “the most intuitive experience for humans” rather than obsessing over competitors.
Osika described Lovable’s mission as building “the last piece of software” — a platform where everything a product organization needs, from understanding users to deploying mission-critical features, can be done through a simple interface.
“A demo, not a memo,” a popular phrase among product leaders, informs how companies are now using Lovable, he said. Employees can now quickly prototype ideas instead of writing lengthy presentations, then test them with early adopters before committing resources.
Despite all the hypergrowth and investor attention, Osika – dressed simply in a beige T-shirt and with his hair floppy in his face – looked very relaxed. The former particle physicist in his 30s was the first employee of the artificial intelligence company Sana Laboratories Before founding Lovable, I went from open source developer to venture-backed founder to must-see conference guest in quick succession. However, he seemed more interested in discussing European business culture than focusing on his company’s trajectory or the attention suddenly heaped on him.
“What matters to me is that everyone in the company, they have a mission, and they really care about what they’re doing and how we succeed as a team,” he said, countering Silicon Valley’s increasingly loud culture. “The best people on my team today, most of them, have kids, and they really care about what we do. They don’t work 12 hours, six days a week.”
Although he added: “Even though it’s a startup, they probably work more than most jobs.”
