It is no secret that vibe coding is exploding in popularity. Vibe coding uses AI-powered tools to build apps and websites through natural language prompts. In July, the Swedish startup Lovable reached one hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue just eight months after its launch. The company plans to close the year at two hundred and fifty million dollars in annual recurring revenue and believes it will hit one billion dollars within the next twelve months.
Meanwhile, Replit announced earlier this month that its annual recurring revenue soared from two point eight million dollars to one hundred and fifty million dollars in less than a year. The remarkable growth of these companies has fueled a wave of competitors, many of which are also quickly gaining momentum. A venture capitalist stated that this is one of those spaces where every company is growing rapidly.
However, despite their rapid growth, Lovable, Replit, and other vibe-coding startups have a significant shortcoming. They excel at developing prototypes but struggle to enable users to launch production-ready software. The problem with most vibe-coding companies is that they do not provide all the infrastructure that nontechnical users need to launch a functional product.
A new AI app called Anything is attempting to solve this problem. It offers all the necessary tools, from databases to storage and payment functionality, that users need to run businesses on the web or to send their creations to the App Store. The company’s initial traction was explosive, reaching a two million dollar annualized run rate in just two weeks.
Though the vibe coding market is crowded, the company’s growth rate is so impressive that the venture capitalist knew he had to fund it. Anything announced on Monday that it has raised an eleven million dollar financing round at a one hundred million dollar valuation. The round was led by Footwork, with additional backing from Uncork, Bessemer, and M13.
Anything was co-founded by former Google colleagues Dhruv Amin and Marcus Lowe. It is particularly designed to help non-technical people generate complete web and mobile applications. Amin stated that you have not really seen real businesses built on top of any of the other tools. He expressed a desire for Anything to be the Shopify of the space, where people build apps that make money on top of their platform.
Amin claims that users have already leveraged Anything to build fully functional applications available in the AppStore. These include a habit tracker, a CPR training course, and a hair-style try-on app. Some of these apps are even starting to generate revenue. According to Amin, these users can finish their apps largely because they do not have to figure out how to set up and connect other essential tools to the prototype generated by the vibe coding app.
The idea for developing a complete AI-assisted app builder came to Amin and Lowe a little under a year ago. The duo has been working together since 2021. Their first offering was a bootstrapped development marketplace that used AI coding tools in conjunction with human developers. This was before the rise of large language models. That business was generating about two million dollars in annualized run rate, but it became clear that generative AI could soon deliver apps faster and at lower costs than their marketplace model.
So, in 2023, they shut down that business and started working on developing an AI-powered app-building tool. They raised some pre-seed and seed funding from Uncork and Bessemer Venture Partners along the way.
Amin and Lowe noticed that most competitive tools rely on a third-party database called Supabase. They believed they could differentiate Anything by building all the infrastructure in-house. That development took time, but it may turn out to be worth the effort.
Anything is not the only startup in this market. It is not even the only one betting that offering all the backend tools can be a big growth driver. Other startups that are building large portions of their own infrastructure include Mocha and Rork. The latter company claims to be on track to hit ten million dollars in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year.
But the intense competition does not faze the venture capitalist. He said it seems there is enough demand out there for different types of app building products.