Every seat in Copenhagen’s Bella Center was full as Anton Osika, the co-founder of the vibe coding app Lovable, took the stage at this year’s TechBBQ conference. Lovable specializes in helping people build apps and websites, especially those with no coding experience. It is one of the standouts in the popular AI category known as vibe-coding, which lets users guide AI models as they produce code, websites, or whole applications.
It has been an attractive proposition for users. In just eight months, the Swedish company said it surpassed one hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue and raised a two hundred million dollar Series A at a one point eight billion dollar valuation, making it Europe’s fastest-growing unicorn. The Financial Times reported that investors are already hoping to launch a Series B, offering deals that would value the company at four billion dollars. So far, there is no indication that Lovable is interested.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Osika laid out a vision for Lovable as the best place to build software products. He described a platform that can take users, specifically founders, through all the stages of product development so they can build AI-native companies more easily. He explained that running a business involves setting up many things like payments and understanding your users, and that in the future, Lovable could even help with tasks like incorporating a company. He wants Lovable to help with all these things.
In late June, Lovable released an agent to help users read files, debug errors, search the web, generate images, and locate files. This was a first step in making good on that vision. Lovable now has more than two point three million active users, one hundred eighty thousand of which are paying subscribers. Osika said the company chose its pricing simply by deciding what would help cover its own costs. His favorite Lovable use cases include a marketer building a sales training platform and an engineer running multiple small businesses on the platform.
He stated that in the past, you could create a really great first draft using Lovable, but now you can build a full product, making it much more like working with a real developer. AI-generated code has been criticized as overly brittle and better suited for demos than finished products, but Osika says he is not concerned. The CEO explained that all code should be reviewed before it is published, whether it is AI or human-generated.
Currently, Lovable operates on other foundational models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s models. There is some tension to that relationship, as Anthropic and OpenAI both operate their own product-development services. Those systems are not exactly the same as Lovable, but it is easy to imagine either model company trying to steal Lovable’s users with a strategic product shift.
So far, Osika does not seem worried. He told TechCrunch that Lovable is simply focused on building the best product and is able to do that by leveraging all the different types of AI model providers, whereas providers need to stick to their own models. He believes this puts Lovable in a better position. He added that tapping into numerous foundation models gives its users unmatched capabilities, while also giving the company the flexibility to grow rapidly without carrying the weight of duplicative infrastructure.
He said the scope of what you can achieve is constantly expanding. To beat the competition, he says the team focuses on three things: how to remain fast and secure while providing an easy user experience. He believes that if they continue to do that, they will build more trust with their customers than anyone else.
It has only been one month since Figma, one of Lovable’s peers in the app-design space, launched its blockbuster IPO, reaching a nineteen point three billion dollar market cap on its opening day. When asked about Figma, Osika simply said the company is still focused on making the best product for its users. He stated that as long as they are listening to their users and giving them what they need, that is all that matters.
Lovable is already deeply tied to the Swedish tech market. Osika grew up in Stockholm and founded the company there. The company’s list of investors includes a number of top European firms and angel investors. Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky, who is based in Europe, is also an angel investor in the company, as is Swedish founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, whose company Klarna is also a client of Lovable. Other well-known clients include HubSpot and Photoroom.
All around the conference, investors and founders lamented what the company staying in Europe means for the Nordic startup ecosystem. The success of Lovable and other European AI unicorns is a success for all of Europe. Beyond the immediate impact of the thousands of Europeans employed by these companies, the greater effect is cultural. It raises the bar for what ambitious founders across the continent can dream of and achieve.
Osika said Lovable plans to stay nestled in Europe, though it does have a team in Los Angeles. Many European tech companies eventually find themselves migrating to the States for more capital and access to opportunities, but Osika does not see Lovable as one of them, for now.
In the wake of Lovable’s success, Osika has started to invest in those founders himself. Dennis Green-Lieber’s Danish consumer intelligence company, Propane, just received an investment from Osika as part of its one point two million dollar seed round. Green-Lieber said that Lovable proves what many in the Nordic scene already feel: that they too have world-class talent and can play on the global stage.
He noted that while the region has had giants like Zendesk, Unity, Klarna, and Spotify over the past decade, what Lovable shows is that with small teams, a global mindset, and relentless effort, you can still build a category-defining company. As a founder, he said it has lit a fire in the ecosystem to see this happen right here at home.