Stockholm-based AI coding platform Lovable is approaching 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told editors during a sit-down on Monday. Osika said the company, which was founded almost exactly a year ago, sees “100,000 new products being built on Lovable every day.”
The metrics point to rapid growth for the startup, which has raised a total of $228 million to date, including a $200 million round this summer that valued the company at $1.8 billion. Rumors have been flying in recent weeks that a new backer wants to invest at a $5 billion valuation, possibly sparked by its own investors, but Osika said the company is not capital constrained and declined to discuss its fundraising plans.
Osika, who spoke to me on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, notably didn’t discuss another number: Lovable’s current annual recurring revenue. The company reached $100 million in ARR in June of this year, a milestone it had publicly touted. However, questions have since arisen about whether the vibe coding boom is sustainable.
Research conducted this summer by Barclays and data from Google Trends shows that traffic to some of the hottest services, including Lovable and Vercel’s v0, has declined after peaking earlier this year. (According to Barclays analysts, traffic to Lovable was down 40% as of September.) “This decline in traffic begs the question whether vibe coding for apps and sites has already peaked out, or whether there is simply a brief lull before interest picks up,” they reportedly wrote in a note to investors.
Still, Osika argued that retention remains strong, citing a net retention rate of over 100%, meaning user spending is increasing over time. He also said the company has “just passed 100 employees” and is currently importing leadership talent from San Francisco to strengthen its Stockholm headquarters.
Lovable was born out of GPT Engineer, an open source tool created by Osika and quickly gained popularity among developers. But he says he quickly realized there was a huge opportunity for the 99% of people who don’t know how to code. “When I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer, I realized I was rethinking how we build software,” Osika said. “I rode my bike to my co-founder’s house and said, ‘I have a great idea.’ I woke him up.”
This platform attracts a wide range of users. More than half of Fortune 500 companies use Lovable to “enhance their creativity,” Osika said. At the same time, an 11-year-old boy in Lisbon is building a Facebook clone for his school, and a Swedish duo are making $700,000 a year from a startup they launched on the platform seven months ago, he said.
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“What I hear from people trying Lovable is, ‘It works,'” Osika said, noting this is a Swedish design sensibility.
Security remains a thorny issue for the vibecoding field. When I brought up the recent incident in which an app built with the Vibe coding tool leaked 72,000 images, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem.
“In engineering organizations, security engineers are the fastest-moving workforce in terms of hiring,” 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 that while Lovable now runs multiple security checks before users deploy it, the platform still requires users building sensitive applications (such as banking apps) to hire security experts, similar to traditional development.
Osika was similarly nonchalant when I asked him about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are AI giants that not only have their models in Lovable, but also release their own coding agents. He sees this market as large enough that there will be multiple winners. “If we can unleash more human creativity and human agency…and just drive change so that anyone with a good idea can create (and) build a business on top of it, that should be celebrated, regardless of who does it.”
This is a decidedly collegial attitude in a little-known industry. (Even Osika has had some light social media sparring with competitor Replit’s Amjad Massad.) But instead of getting hung up on his rivals, he said he’s now focused on building “the most intuitive experience for humans.”
Osika described Lovable’s mission as building “the last piece of software,” a platform that allows product organizations to do everything they need from understanding users to deploying mission-critical features through a simple interface.
He said the phrase “it’s a demo, don’t take notes”, which is often used among product leaders, is a good representation of how companies are using Lovable today. Instead of creating long presentations, employees can now quickly prototype ideas and test them with early users before committing resources.
Despite rapid growth and attention from investors, Mr. Osika, wearing a simple beige T-shirt and a matching button-down with floppy hair framing his face, seemed quite at ease. The 30-something elemental particle physicist, who was Sauna Labs’ first employee before founding Lovable, has gone from open source developer to venture-backed founder to indispensable conference guest in quick succession. Still, he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than dwelling on the company’s trajectory or the attention suddenly focused on him.
“What I care about is that everyone at the company is mission-driven and really thinks about what they’re doing and how to succeed as a team,” he said, pushing back against Silicon Valley’s growing hustle culture. “Today, the best people on my team, most of whom have children, really, really care about what we’re doing. They’re not working 12 hours, six days a week.”
However, he added, “However, since it’s a startup, they’re probably working more than they would at other jobs.”
