Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is approaching 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a sit-down Monday, a big 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 — is also seeing “100,000 new products built on Lovable every single day.”
The metrics suggest 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 — potentially sparked 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 in June, a milestone it shared publicly. But questions have since arisen 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 liveliest services, including Lovable and Vercels v0, had fallen after peaking earlier this year. (Traffic to Lovable fell 40% in September, according to the Barclays analysts.) “This slowing traffic raises the question of whether app/site vibecoding has already peaked or just had a bit of a hiatus before interest picks up,” they reportedly wrote in a note to investors.
Still, Osika said retention remains strong, citing more than 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 importing executive 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% of people who don’t know how to code. “I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and I realized, look, we need to reimagine how you build software,” Osika said. “I rode my bike to my co-founder’s place and I 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 is making $700,000 annually from a startup they 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, crediting what he described as Swedish design sensibilities.
Security remains a more difficult issue for the vibe coding sector. When I raised a recent incident where an app built with vibe coding tools leaked 72,000 images into the wild, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem.
“The part of the engineering organization where we’re moving the fastest to hire is security engineers,” he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable “more secure than building with just human-written code.” In fact, he said, before users can deploy, Lovable now runs more security checks, though the platform still requires users to build sensitive applications — banking apps, for example — to hire security experts, just as they would with traditional development.
Osika was similarly matter-of-fact when I asked about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI giants whose models power Lovable but which have also released their own coding agents. He sees the market as big enough for several winners. “If we can unlock more human creativity and human agency … and just drive the change so that anyone can create, if they have good ideas, [and] build businesses on top of it, it should be celebrated, regardless of who does it.”
It’s a decidedly collegial attitude in an industry not known for it. (Even Osika has engaged in light sparring on social media with Amjad Masad of competitor Replit.) But he said his focus right now is on building “the most intuitive experience for people” 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, from understanding users to implementing mission-critical features, can be done through a simple interface.
“Demo, don’t memo,” a popular phrase among product managers, captures how companies are now using Lovable, he said. Employees can now quickly prototype ideas instead of writing long presentations, then test them with early adopters before committing resources.
Despite all the hyper-growth and investor attention, Osika – dressed in a beige T-shirt and matching button-down, floppy hair framing his face – seemed very comfortable. The 30-year-old former particle physicist, who was the first employee at AI company Sana Labs before founding Lovable, has gone from open source developer to venture-backed founder to must-have conference guest in quick succession. Yet he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than dwelling on his company’s trajectory or the attention suddenly showered upon him.
“What I care about is that everybody that’s in the company, they’re mission-driven, they really care about what they’re doing and how we as a team succeed,” he said, pushing back against Silicon Valley’s intensifying hustling culture. “The best people on my team today, most of them, they have kids and they really, 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, they probably work more than most jobs.”