Lovablethe Stockholm-based artificial intelligence coding platform is approaching 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a discussion on Monday, a significant jump from the 2.3 million active users the company shared in July. Osika said the company — which was founded almost exactly a year ago — also sees “100,000 new products being built on Lovable every day.”
The metrics indicate rapid growth for the startup, which has raised $228 million in total funding to date, including a $200 million round this summer that valued the company at $1.8 billion. Rumors have swirled in recent weeks — possibly fueled by its own investors — that new backers want to invest at a $5 billion valuation, though Osika said the company is not capital-constrained and declined to discuss fundraising plans.
Speaking to me on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, Osika didn’t mention another number: Lovable’s current annual recurring revenue. The company, which uses a mix of free and paid tiers, hit $100 million in ARR this June, a milestone it shared publicly. However, questions have since arisen about whether the vibe coding boom is sustainable.
Research by Barclays this summer, along with Google Trends data, showed that traffic to some of the busiest services, including Lovable and Vercel’s v0, had declined after peaking earlier this year. (Traffic to Lovable was down 40% in September, according to analysts at Barclays.) “This declining traffic raises the question of whether app/website vibecoding has already peaked or just had a lull before picking up interest,” they reportedly wrote in a note to investors.
However, Osika said retention remains strong, reporting over 100% net dollar retention — meaning users are spending more over time. He also said the company “just passed” the 100-employee mark and is now bringing in leadership talent from San Francisco to bolster its Stockholm headquarters.
Lovable grew out of GPT Engineer, an open source tool built by Osika that went viral among developers. But he says he quickly realized the biggest opportunity lay with the 99% of people who don’t know how to code. “I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and realized, look, we’re going to rethink how you build software,” Osika said. “I rode my bike over to my co-founder’s house and said, I have this great idea. I woke him up.”
The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies use 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 earns $700,000 a year from a startup launched seven months ago on the platform.
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“What I hear from people who try Lovable is, ‘It just works,'” Osika said, attributing what he described as a Swedish design sensibility.
Security remains a more dangerous issue for the vibe coding sector. When I brought up a recent incident in which an app built with vibe coding tools leaked 72,000 images in the wild, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem.
“The part of the engineering organization where we’re moving the fastest in hiring is security engineers,” he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable “more secure than just building with human-written code.” In fact, he said, before users can develop, Lovable now runs multiple security checks, though the platform still requires users building sensitive apps — banking apps, for example — to hire security experts, as they would with traditional development.
Osika was equally forthcoming when I asked about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI giants whose models power Lovable but have also released their own coding agents. He sees the market big enough for many winners. “If we can unlock more human creativity and human action… and just drive the change so that everyone can create if they have good ideas, [and] build businesses on top of it, that should be celebrated, no matter who does it.”
It’s a decidedly collective attitude in an industry not known for it. (Even Osika has dealt with some light boxing on social media with Amjad Masad of competitor Replit.) But he said he’s currently focused on building “the most intuitive experience for people” rather than obsessing over rivals.
Osika described Lovable’s mission as creating “the ultimate software” — a platform where everything a product organization needs, from understanding users to developing mission-critical features, can be done through a simple interface.
“Demo, don’t memo,” a popular phrase among product leaders, captures how companies now use Lovable, he said. Employees can now quickly prototype ideas instead of writing long presentations and then test them with early users before committing resources.
Despite the hype and investor attention, Osika — dressed simply in a beige T-shirt and matching button-down, floppy hair framing his face — looked very comfortable. The 30-year-old former particle physicist, who was an early employee at Sauna Labs before founding Lovable, has gone from open source developer to venture-backed founder to essential conference guest in succession. However, he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than his company’s performance or the attention he was suddenly receiving.
“What I care about is that everybody in the company is mission-driven, really cares about what they’re doing and how we’re doing as a team,” he said, countering Silicon Valley’s intensifying hustle culture. “The best people on my team today, most of them, have kids, and they really care about what we’re doing. They’re not working 12 hours, six days a week.”
Although he added: “Even though it’s a startup, so they probably work longer than most jobs.”
