It might be debatable as to how AI will transform in world in the coming years, but it seems to be already accelerating timelines in the startup world.
Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable has become a unicorn just 8 months after being founded. Lovable raised $200 million in a Series A round led by Accel. The round values the company at $1.8 billion.
Lovable lets users describe an app in plain English, and its AI generates production-grade code, including front-end, backend, and database functions. As opposed to generating just code snippets, Lovable takes the full stack AI-engineer approach, and enables users to create complex and scalable apps in minutes. Word of mouth publicity around the company and its capabilities has been intense, and Lovable went viral soon after launch.
It’s pretty remarkable for a company to reach a $1.8 billion valuation in eight months, but Lovable wasn’t the founders’ first stab at building in the coding space. Lovable’s roots trace back to mid-2023, when Anton Osika developed GPT Engineer, an open-source project that quickly gained traction with developers. GPT Engineer received over 50,000 GitHub stars, and it validated strong product-market fit for automated code generation. Anton Osika was the former CTO at YC-backed Depict and had deep roots in AI and open-source, while Fabian Hedin, the co-founder, was the front-end lead at Depict.
The team then launched gptengineer.app in 2024, gradually building out a product, but faced challenges with reliability and scalability for complex apps. In November 2024, the company pivoted to Lovable, which provided a user-friendly graphical interface that opened the platform to non-technical users.
There was clearly a market for such a product for non-technical users — Lovable got over 3,000 paying customers and $1 million ARR within weeks of launch, and hit the $10M ARR number in 60 days. Lovable now has 500,000 users on its platform, of which 30,000 are paid subscribers. It sees 25,000 new apps be launched using the platform every day. Lovable ARR is now around $75 million.
Lovable is one of the names that have ridden the AI coding wave. Cursor, which helps developers write code using AI, is worth $9.9 billion, and Windsurf was recently acquired by Google for $2.4 billion. And while the future of coders and coding might be up in the air, as Lovable’s recent unicorn status shows, it’s helping AI companies supercharge their growth like never before.