{"id":133060,"date":"2025-11-11T00:03:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/133060\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T00:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:03:07","slug":"lovable-says-its-nearing-8-million-users-as-the-year-old-ai-coding-startup-eyes-more-corporate-employees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/133060\/","title":{"rendered":"Lovable says it’s nearing 8 million users as the year-old AI coding startup eyes more corporate employees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lovable<\/a>, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is closing in on 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a sit-down on Monday, a major jump from the 2.3 million<\/a> active users number the company shared in July. Osika said the company \u2014 which was founded almost exactly one year ago \u2014 is also seeing \u201c100,000 new products built on Lovable every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

The metrics suggest rapid growth of 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 \u2014 potentially sparked by its own investors \u2014 that new backers want to invest at a $5 billion valuation, though Osika said the company isn\u2019t capital constrained and declined to discuss fundraising plans.<\/p>\n

Speaking to me on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, Osika notably didn\u2019t share another number: Lovable\u2019s current annual recurring revenue. The company hit $100 million in ARR this June, a milestone it trumpeted publicly. But questions have emerged since about whether the vibe coding boom is sustainable. <\/p>\n

Research<\/a> from Barclays this summer, along with Google Trends data, showed that traffic to some of the buzziest services, including Lovable and Vercel\u2019s v0, had declined after peaking earlier this year. (Traffic to Lovable was down 40% as of September, according to the Barclays analysts.) \u201cThis waning traffic begs the question on whether app\/site vibecoding has peaked out already or has just had a bit of a lull before interest ramps up,\u201d they reportedly wrote in a note to investors.<\/p>\n

Still, Osika insisted retention remains strong, citing more than 100% net dollar retention \u2014 meaning users\u2019 spend more over time. He also said the company has \u201cjust passed\u201d the 100-employee mark and is now importing leadership talent from San Francisco to bolster its Stockholm headquarters.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t know how to code. \u201cI woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and I realized, look, we\u2019re going to reimagine how you build software,\u201d Osika said. \u201cI biked to my co-founder\u2019s place, and I said, I have this great idea. I woke him up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies are using Lovable to \u201csupercharge creativity,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I hear from people trying Lovable is, \u2018It just works,\u2019\u201d Osika said, crediting what he described as Swedish design sensibility.<\/p>\n

Security remains a thornier issue for the vibe coding sector. When I raised a recent incident in which an app built with vibe coding tools leaked 72,000 images into the wild, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe part of the engineering organization where we\u2019re moving the quickest on hiring is security engineers,\u201d he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable \u201cmore secure than building with just human-written code.\u201d In fact, he said, before users can deploy, Lovable now runs multiple security checks, though the platform still requires users building sensitive applications \u2014 banking apps, for instance \u2014 to hire security experts, just as they would with traditional development.<\/p>\n

Osika was similarly matter-of-fact when I asked about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI giants whose models power Lovable but that have also released their own coding agents. He sees the market as big enough for multiple winners. \u201cIf we can unlock more human creativity and human agency . . . and just driving the change so that anyone can create if they have good ideas, [and] build businesses on top of that, that should be celebrated, regardless of whoever does that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a decidedly collegial stance in an industry not known for it. (Even Osika has engaged in some light social media sparring<\/a> with Amjad Masad of competitor Replit.) But he said his focus right now is on building \u201cthe most intuitive experience for humans\u201d rather than obsessing over rivals.<\/p>\n

Osika described Lovable\u2019s mission as building \u201cthe last piece of software\u201d \u2014 a platform where everything a product organization needs, from understanding users to deploying mission-critical features, can be done through a simple interface. <\/p>\n

\u201cDemo, don\u2019t memo,\u201d a popular phrase among product leaders, captures how companies now use Lovable, he said. Employees can now quickly prototype ideas rather than writing long presentations, then test them with early users before committing resources.<\/p>\n

For all the hypergrowth and investor attention, Osika \u2014 dressed simply in a beige T-shirt and matching button-down, floppy hair framing his face \u2014 appeared very much at ease. The 30-something former particle physicist, who was the first employee at Sauna Labs before founding Lovable, has gone from open-source developer to venture-backed founder to must-have conference guest in rapid succession. Yet he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than dwelling on his company\u2019s trajectory or the attention suddenly being showered on him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I care about is that everyone who\u2019s at the company, they\u2019re mission driven, they really care about what they\u2019re doing and how we as a team succeed,\u201d he said, pushing back against Silicon Valley\u2019s intensifying hustle culture. \u201cThe best people in my team today, most of them, they have kids, and they really, really care about what we\u2019re doing. They\u2019re not working 12 hours, six days a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he added: \u201cAlthough it\u2019s a startup, so they\u2019re probably working more than most jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is closing in on 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[77593,61,60,77594,77595,80,20092],"class_list":{"0":"post-133060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-anton-osika","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-lovable","12":"tag-replit","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-vibe-coding"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}