Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is closing in on 8 million users, according to CEO Anton Osika. This is a major jump from the 2.3 million active users the company shared in July. Osika said the company, which was founded almost exactly one year ago, is also seeing 100,000 new products built on Lovable every single day.
These metrics suggest rapid growth for the startup. It has raised 228 million dollars in total funding to date, including a 200 million dollar round this summer that valued the company at 1.8 billion dollars. Rumors have swirled in recent weeks that new backers want to invest at a 5 billion dollar valuation. However, Osika said the company is not capital constrained and declined to discuss fundraising plans.
Speaking on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, Osika notably did not share Lovable’s current annual recurring revenue. The company hit 100 million dollars in ARR this June, a milestone it trumpeted publicly. But questions have emerged since about whether the vibe coding boom is sustainable. Research from Barclays this summer, along with Google Trends data, showed that traffic to some of the buzziest services, including Lovable, had declined after peaking earlier this year. Traffic to Lovable was down 40 percent as of September, according to the Barclays analysts. They reportedly wrote that this waning traffic begs the question on whether vibe coding has peaked or is just in a lull before interest ramps up.
Still, Osika insisted retention remains strong, citing more than 100 percent net dollar retention, meaning users spend more over time. He also said the company has 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 Osika built that went viral among developers. But he says he quickly realized the bigger opportunity lay with the 99 percent of people who do not know how to code. He described waking up a few days after building GPT Engineer and realizing they were going to reimagine how you build software. He then biked to his co-founder’s place to share the idea.
The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies are using Lovable to supercharge creativity, according to Osika. At the same time, he said an 11-year-old in Lisbon built a Facebook clone for his school, while a Swedish duo is making 700,000 dollars annually from a startup they launched seven months ago on the platform. Osika credited what he described as Swedish design sensibility, noting that what he hears from people trying Lovable is that it just works.
Security remains a thornier issue for the vibe coding sector. When asked about a recent incident in which an app built with vibe coding tools leaked 72,000 images, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem. He said the part of the engineering organization where they are moving the quickest on hiring is security engineers. His goal is to make building with Lovable more secure than building with just human-written code. He explained that before users can deploy, Lovable now runs multiple security checks. However, the platform still requires users building sensitive applications, like banking apps, to hire security experts, just as they would with traditional development.
Osika was similarly matter-of-fact when asked about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI giants whose models power Lovable but that have also released their own coding agents. He sees the market as big enough for multiple winners. He believes that unlocking more human creativity and agency so that anyone can create and build businesses should be celebrated, regardless of who does it.
This is a decidedly collegial stance in an industry not known for it. But he said his focus right now is on building the most intuitive experience for humans rather than obsessing over rivals. Osika described Lovable’s mission as building the last piece of software, a platform where everything a product organization needs can be done through a simple interface. He said a popular phrase, demo do not memo, captures how companies now use Lovable. Employees can quickly prototype ideas and test them with early users before committing resources.
For all the hypergrowth and investor attention, Osika appeared very much at ease. The 30-something former particle physicist has gone from open-source developer to venture-backed founder to must-have conference guest in rapid succession. Yet he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than dwelling on his company’s trajectory. He said he cares that everyone at the company is mission driven and that the team succeeds, pushing back against Silicon Valley’s intensifying hustle culture. He stated that the best people on his team have kids and really care about what they are doing, and they are not working 12 hours, six days a week, though he added that it is a startup so they are probably working more than most jobs.