In the spring of 2025, Anton Osika was in the middle of raising the round that would make Lovable a unicorn, and the advice from investors kept arriving in the same shape: move to San Francisco. It’s where the talent is, where the capital is, where AI companies are supposed to build. “A lot of people say to me, ‘By staying in Europe you are deliberately not doing what is best for your career,’” he recalled being told. He didn’t move. “It was tempting, but I really resisted that.”
Eighteen months later, that decision looks less like stubbornness and more like the thesis of the company. Lovable — the Stockholm-based startup that lets anyone build working software by typing what they want in plain English — crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue faster than any software company Forbes could find a precedent for, then kept compounding from there. In August 2026, it closed a $400 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation. The headquarters never left Sweden.
From an open-source side project to a renamed unicorn
Osika didn’t set out to build a $13 billion company. He built an open-source tool.
Before Lovable existed, Osika — a KTH Royal Institute of Technology graduate who’d started coding at twelve and later worked as a founding engineer at Sana Labs before co-founding and serving as CTO of Depict AI — released GPT Engineer, an open-source project that used large language models to write software from natural-language prompts. It became one of the fastest-growing repositories in GitHub’s history, passing 51,000 stars.
Osika and Fabian Hedin, a former Depict colleague who’d go on to become Lovable’s CTO, founded the company in Stockholm in November 2023 to turn that open-source momentum into a product. A commercial version, GPT Engineer App, launched in late 2023 aimed at people who couldn’t code at all, and landed on the front pages of Product Hunt and Hacker News within days. In December 2024, the company renamed the product Lovable.
Ten million dollars in sixty days
The renamed product didn’t just find an audience — it found a business model almost immediately. Lovable reached $10 million in annualized revenue within 60 days of its relaunch, with a team of roughly 15 people, according to the company’s own account in an interview with Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny’s Newsletter. Day-30 user retention, Osika has said, ran higher than ChatGPT’s.
From there the climb didn’t slow. By July 2025, Lovable had crossed $100 million in ARR — a run Forbes described as turning “this Swedish AI unicorn into the fastest-growing software startup ever.” Around the same time, the company closed a $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation led by Accel, roughly eight months after the renamed product’s launch. By September 2025, Osika was on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt talking about what it meant to build “one of the fastest-growing startups in history.”
The number kept doubling. At the Slush conference in Helsinki in November 2025, Osika announced Lovable had reached $200 million in ARR — twice its July figure, four months later. A $330 million Series B followed in December 2025, led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, valuing the company at $6.6 billion.
$13.3 billion, and the company describes itself as still early
By June 2026, Forbes was reporting Lovable was in talks to raise again at a valuation near $12 billion. On August 12, 2026, the company confirmed the number was higher: a $400 million Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation, co-led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, with new backers including Balderton Capital, Tencent, and Regent, alongside returning investors Accel, DST Global, HubSpot Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
“We’ve quadrupled ARR in the last 12 months,” Osika wrote, announcing the round, adding that apps built on Lovable now get 900 million visits every month. In the company’s own post announcing the raise, he framed it as a shift in ambition rather than a victory lap: “Lovable’s first chapter was about making it possible for more people to build software. This next chapter is about helping them run and grow what they build.”
The company said it plans to grow to roughly 450 people over the following year, hiring most heavily in machine learning, infrastructure, and security — while keeping Stockholm as its base and treating London, Boston, San Francisco, and New York as satellite offices, not relocations.
The bet that Europe wasn’t the problem
Osika has been consistent, across a run of interviews through 2026, that the decision to stay in Stockholm wasn’t sentimental — it was a wager that European founders had talked themselves out of believing they could build category-defining companies at home. “The talent was never the problem,” he said. “The belief that you could build from here was.”
It’s a claim that’s easy to make and hard to prove — except that Lovable is, at this point, the proof. A tool that started as one engineer’s open-source experiment now serves a platform generating nearly a billion monthly visits to apps built on it, run by a company that turned down the industry’s default advice at every stage of its growth. The product made it easier for people with no coding background to build software. The company made the same argument about geography: the constraint everyone assumed was real, wasn’t.
Related founders
- How Eric Simons Built Bolt.new to a $700M Valuation — another AI coding startup that went from near-shutdown to one of the fastest revenue climbs in software history, built in the same “vibe coding” wave.
- Six Months, $80 Million: How Maor Shlomo Built Base44 Alone — a solo Israeli founder who built and sold a vibe-coded AI platform for $80 million without a co-founder or outside investment.
- Pieter Levels Built a Flight Simulator in Three Hours. It Made $1M ARR in Seventeen Days. — a founder on the opposite end of the AI-building spectrum: no funding, no team, just a decade of public shipping.
Lovable’s founding story, the GPT Engineer origins, and the December 2024 rename are drawn from the company’s own account and from Cord Magazine’s profile of CTO Fabian Hedin (“Coding Without Code,” cordmagazine.com). The $10 million ARR in 60 days and day-30 retention figures are from Lovable’s interview with Lenny Rachitsky (“Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people,” lennysnewsletter.com). The $100 million ARR milestone and “fastest-growing software startup ever” characterization are per Forbes (Iain Martin, July 23, 2025). The $200 million Series A, Accel’s lead, and the $1.8 billion valuation are per TechCrunch’s coverage of Lovable’s September 2025 TechCrunch Disrupt appearance. The $200 million ARR milestone announced at Slush 2025 is per TechCrunch (“As Lovable hits $200M ARR, its CEO credits staying in Europe for its success,” November 19, 2025) and Tech Startups. The December 2025 $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, is per CNBC, Cooley, and Lovable’s own announcement (lovable.dev/blog/series-b). The June 2026 report of talks at a $12 billion valuation is per Forbes (Rashi Shrivastava). The August 12, 2026 $400 million Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation, its co-leads and investor list, hiring plans, and Osika’s quotes are per TechCrunch (“Lovable confirms new $13.3B valuation, raises another $400M”) and Lovable’s own announcement (lovable.dev/blog/series-c). Osika’s quotes on staying in Stockholm and Europe’s “confidence problem” are per Sifted’s interview with Osika and The Next Web’s coverage of his remarks on Europe and Silicon Valley.
