In a little over two years, Stockholm’based Lovable has gone from a weekend open’source experiment to one of Europe’s most closely watched AI startups. Its platform promises to let anyone build full’stack web apps simply by chatting with an AI. Along the way, the company has raised more than $200 million, hit a self’reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within a year of launch, and sparked both investor enthusiasm and security concerns.
This is the story of how Lovable was built, what its software actually does, the controversies around its growth, and where the company is heading next.
From GPT Engineer to Lovable
Lovable’s origins go back to mid’2023, shortly after OpenAI released the first ChatGPT APIs. Swedish engineer and serial founder Anton Osika began experimenting with how large language models could write entire codebases, not just small snippets. Over the course of a few weekends he hacked together an open’source command’line tool called GPT Engineer, which let users describe a project in natural language and have an AI generate and iteratively refine the code.
GPT Engineer quickly went viral on GitHub and developer forums, amassing tens of thousands of stars and a waitlist of more than 27,000 people for a hosted version. Seeing that demand, Osika teamed up with long’time collaborator Fabian Hedin’an engineer and entrepreneur who had previously worked on assistive technology and sold a prop’tech startup while still in school’to turn the experiment into a business.
In October 2024 the pair raised a pre’seed round of ‘6.8 million (roughly $7’8 million) led by Hummingbird and byFounders to commercialise GPT Engineer as a web app. The early product allowed users to describe the features they wanted in a website or web app and receive production’ready React and backend code in real time, positioning itself as a European rival to US developer’tool startups like Replit.
By late 2024, the company rebranded from GPT Engineer App to Lovable, arguing that it had moved beyond a developer utility into something aimed at a broader audience of ‘builders.’ The mission, as the team now frames it, is to let the other 99% of people who can’t code build software by talking to an AI.
What Lovable actually does
Lovable describes itself as an AI ‘full’stack engineer’ or ‘vibe’coding’ platform. In practical terms, it’s a browser’based development environment where a user types a prompt”a booking system for a small restaurant,’ for example’and the system generates a working web application: frontend, database schema, authentication and deployment.
Under the hood, Lovable orchestrates several large language models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic, along with its own tooling. Earlier iterations leaned heavily on Supabase for databases and authentication; newer versions also offer ‘Lovable Cloud,’ which can automatically handle log’in, file uploads and AI features, and integrations into tools like Shopify.
Users can iteratively refine apps through chat (‘add a payments page using Stripe’, ‘make this page mobile’friendly’) and, if they’re technical, sync the generated code to GitHub for deeper modification. The platform is freemium: simple projects can be built for free, while heavier AI usage and advanced features are paid, with subscription pricing starting at a few tens of dollars per month.
Typical use cases range from solo founders spinning up MVPs, through small businesses replacing spreadsheets with internal tools, to product teams inside enterprises who want live prototypes in minutes. Lovable has cited usage by companies like Brazilian edtech firm QConcursos, which reportedly built a premium app on the platform that generated millions of dollars in sales within days, and by corporate teams at Klarna, HubSpot and Delivery Hero for rapid prototyping.
Record’setting funding and growth
Lovable’s growth metrics have attracted global attention.
- October 2024 pre’seed: Lovable raises ‘6.8m to build out GPT Engineer, on the back of a viral open’source project and a fast’growing waitlist.
- February 2025 pre’Series A: The company secures a $15m pre’Series A led by Creandum. At that point it reports $17m ARR and around 30,000 paying customers, achieved on roughly $2m of spend.
- July 2025 Series A: Lovable announces a $200m Series A led by Accel at a $1.8bn valuation, only eight months after the public launch of the Lovable app in November 2024.
By mid’2025, TechCrunch reported that Lovable had more than 2.3 million active users, over 180,000 paying subscribers and ARR of $75m just seven months after launch. Later that month, Forbes wrote that annualised subscription revenue had crossed $100m in roughly eight months, calling Lovable ‘the fastest’growing software startup in history’ on that metric.
In November 2025, a one’year retrospective on Lovable’s own blog stated that ARR had doubled again to $200m, that users were building about 100,000 new projects each day, and that apps built with Lovable were seeing around 5 million visits daily. Tech Startups, citing Bloomberg and Reuters, reported the same $200m ARR figure and said Lovable was exploring a new funding round at a valuation north of $6bn.
If those figures withstand scrutiny, they would place Lovable among the fastest’growing subscription software businesses on record.
A European answer to Silicon Valley developer tools
Lovable’s trajectory also reflects a broader shift in where cutting’edge developer tools are being built. Based in Stockholm and founded in 2023, the company sits within a cluster of Scandinavian AI startups that includes Mistral’s Nordic investors, DeepL’s European push and a wave of specialized ‘vibe’coding’ tools. Financial Times+1
For investors, the pitch is that Lovable can give non’technical founders and small teams the capabilities of an in’house product and engineering department. Accel partner Ben Fletcher has said publicly that he first invested after building his own internal tools on Lovable in a weekend, seeing it as an ‘opinionated CTO that builds your product for you.’
Lovable’s own product roadmap underlines its ambition to be more than a demo tool. In 2025 the company launched Lovable Cloud and a deeper AI layer, opened offices in Boston and San Francisco, and, in November, acquired Swedish cloud provider Molnett to bring more of its infrastructure in’house and strengthen its position on secure, sovereign hosting.
Security wake’up call: CVE’2025’48757
Rapid growth has come with serious security scrutiny.
In March 2025, Replit developer’relations engineer Matt Palmer discovered that a Lovable’built site called Linkable exposed all user records from its Supabase database due to misconfigured access controls. Further scanning of 1,645 Lovable’featured apps found around 170 where unauthenticated visitors could access sensitive data such as user details and API keys. The issue was later assigned the identifier CVE’2025’48757 in the US National Vulnerabilities Database.
Security analysts at Superblocks and elsewhere concluded that the root problem was how Lovable’generated apps used row’level security rules in combination with Supabase: if those rules were left in a permissive state, attackers could read or modify data directly from the browser. Importantly, this vulnerability affected many apps built on the platform rather than Lovable’s own core systems, highlighting the risk when non’experts ship database’backed applications with minimal review.
Lovable’s response evolved over the spring. Publicly, the company said it had added an automatic scan that checks whether database access controls are enabled before an app is published, and it encouraged users handling highly sensitive data to request additional human security review. Critics, including security researchers quoted by Semafor, argued that simply checking for the presence of access controls is not enough if those controls are misconfigured.
The episode has become a case study in the security trade’offs of ‘vibe coding’: AI can help people ship sophisticated products quickly, but it cannot yet guarantee secure architectures, and many new ‘developers’ may not even know what to ask.
Questions over headline growth numbers
The company’s meteoric revenue claims have also drawn scrutiny, particularly in Sweden.
After Lovable announced in July 2025 that it had surpassed $100m in ARR, multiple outlets’including Forbes’repeated the figure and hailed it as a record. A subsequent investigation by Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported that Lovable’s ARR calculation was based on taking a single recent month of gross revenue and multiplying it by twelve, without adjusting for churn or future growth assumptions. Academic accounting experts interviewed by the paper described that approach as ‘shaky’ and noted the lack of standardized disclosure for ARR figures.
None of this means the underlying business isn’t growing fast’payment processor and investor data cited by the Financial Times and others do show tens of millions of dollars in recurring revenue and tens of thousands of paying customers. But it does underline that Lovable’s most eye’catching claims are self’reported metrics rather than audited financial statements, and that comparisons with other software companies should be treated cautiously.
The people behind the platform
Lovable’s story is also shaped by the unusual backgrounds of its founders.
CEO Anton Osika studied engineering physics and applied mathematics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, did research at CERN, and previously co’founded e’commerce AI startup Depict.ai, a Y Combinator’backed company that raised roughly $20m before he left in 2023 to focus on Lovable.
CTO Fabian Hedin has been building tech projects since childhood. Profiles in European startup media describe him developing assistive’technology interfaces, including work related to Stephen Hawking’s communication systems, and selling his first prop’tech startup while still in high school.
The pair share an explicitly ambitious vision: in their words, Lovable should become ‘the last piece of software’ a tool that writes other software so well that most people will never need to touch code directly.
What comes next
As of late 2025, Lovable sits at a crossroads. It has:
- A fast’growing platform used by millions, with a freemium model converting hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.
- A security incident that exposed how risky it can be when non’experts deploy database’backed apps, pushing the company to invest more visibly in safeguards.
- A war chest of at least $200m and ongoing talks that could push its valuation toward the multi’billion’dollar range.
- Competition from both pure’play rivals like Cursor and Replit and from tech giants such as OpenAI and Google, which are embedding similar capabilities directly into their own ecosystems.
Internally, Lovable’s leadership says year two will be about proving that the model scales: not just for solo founders, but inside large companies that want bespoke tools without building big engineering teams. The acquisition of Molnett and new US offices indicate a push toward more control over infrastructure and closer relationships with enterprise customers.
Whether Lovable ultimately becomes ‘the last piece of software’ or one of several major players in AI’assisted development, its rapid rise from a side project to a multi’billion’dollar company marks a significant moment for European tech’and a glimpse of how software creation may look in the age of conversational AI.
This article is based on public company materials, official blog posts, and reporting from outlets including the Financial Times, TechCrunch, Forbes, Semafor, EU’Startups, Tech.eu and major Swedish newspapers, all accessed in December 2025. Figures and valuations are subject to change as Lovable continues to raise capital and update its disclosures.
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