Lovable cofounder and CEO Anton Osika just landed Sweden’s largest-ever Series A for the ‘vibe coding’ startup that’s now valued at $1.8 billion.<\/p>\n
Svante Gullichsen Photography<\/p>\n
Lovable\u2019s founder and CEO Anton Osika likes to quip that building his \u2018vibe coding\u2019 startup in Europe is like playing a game on \u201chard mode.\u201d But that hasn\u2019t stopped him from scoring some early wins. The two-year-old AI startup just raised $200 million at a $1.8 billion valuation in Sweden\u2019s largest-ever Series A round.<\/p>\n
That mints Stockholm-based Lovable as Sweden\u2019s latest unicorn, joining a roster that includes fintech Klarna, music streaming giant Spotify and Candy Crush developer King. The deal comes as investor interest in AI code writing startups is running at fever pitch after Google spoiled OpenAI\u2019s takeover of Windsurf by poaching key execs in a $2.4 billion deal<\/a> announced this week, with the rump of the company bought by rival Cognition<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lovable and its American competitors Replit and StackBlitz have themselves seen huge growth over the last year by focusing on a potentially much larger pool of users who can\u2019t code. These \u2018AI builder\u2019 tools tap the coding and reasoning power of large language models to turn simple written instructions into websites and apps in minutes. \u201cOur mission is to enable anyone to build,\u201d Lovable cofounder and CEO Osika told Forbes.<\/p>\n That\u2019s caught the attention of established design rivals like Figma and Squarespace who have built their own code-writing tools, while Nasdaq-listed Wix dropped $80 million in June to buy startup Base44<\/a>. Now, Osika has reinforcement from some investors with deep pockets in the form of lead VC Accel and earlier backers like 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird and Visionaries Club, who joined the round. \u201cLovable is for the 99% of folks that have not had access to this ability to build before,\u201d said Accel partner Ben Fletcher. Accel also invested in a $900 million round<\/a> for San Francisco-based developer coding tool Cursor last month.<\/p>\n Osika said that the $200 million investment would help Lovable grow its 45-person team and build out its product to support users working on more complex apps and websites. The startup is also pushing to work with inhouse teams at large companies and has already landed deals with Klarna, Salesforce-rival Hubspot and French photo editing startup Photoroom.<\/p>\n Those enterprises are likely to have more exacting standards when it comes to security than coding neophytes. Semafor<\/a> reported earlier this year that Lovable\u2019s AI had created apps with security vulnerabilities that exposed user data. Lovable disputed that its AI was responsible for the leak but has since stepped up security checks. \u201cOver the past few months we have shipped several improvements to ensure that system reviews for security problems,\u201d said Osika. \u201cWe need to get to a place where it requires extreme negligence by not listening to Lovable to create something that\u2019s not secure.\u201d<\/p>\n The round sees the two-year-old company, which had previously raised only $22.5 million, outpace its main American rivals on fundraising. Replit raised $97 million in 2023, and StackBlitz, which runs code tool Bolt, was reported in January to be in talks<\/a> to raise $80 million at a $700 million valuation. Bloomberg<\/a> previously reported that Lovable was in talks with investors last month.<\/p>\n Lovable is now also the largest of a cluster of new AI startups emerging from the Swedish capital. Forbes reported in May that legal AI startup Legora<\/a> raised $80 million, while AI agent company Sana<\/a> raised a $55 million round in October 2024. Lovable has also been backed by Klarna cofounder Sebastian Siemiatkowski\u2019s venture fund Flat Capital and other European tech billionaires like Revolut\u2019s Nik Storonsky, Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen and Datadog\u2019s Olivier Pomel also invested in this round.<\/p>\n Osika credits Lovable\u2019s growth to the raw pool of AI talent that has emerged from Sweden\u2019s older cohort of unicorns and this new field of AI-focused startups. The Lovable cofounder himself had previously worked at Sana and another Stockholm-based AI company.<\/p>\n Despite Sweden\u2019s growing tech scene, Europe has lagged behind the United States and China in building large language models, and San Francisco has remerged as the capital of the startup world. But Osika thinks his hometown could give him an edge. \u201cThe average ambition level in Europe is much lower than the U.S but if we can ignite we have more of the raw fuel to build a generational company,\u201d says Osika.<\/p>\n More on ForbesForbesAI Startup LangChain Is In Talks To Raise $100 MillionBy Rashi Shrivastava<\/a>ForbesThis Top VC Wants To Use Main Street America As An AI LabBy Iain Martin<\/a>ForbesFor AI Startups, A 7-Day Work Week Isn\u2019t EnoughBy Richard Nieva<\/a>ForbesThis AI Founder Became A Billionaire By Building ChatGPT For DoctorsBy Amy Feldman<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lovable cofounder and CEO Anton Osika just landed Sweden’s largest-ever Series A for the ‘vibe coding’ startup that’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,1119,733,4308,5231,1208,1668,86,56,5232,54,55,4213,165],"class_list":{"0":"post-8548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-no-code","13":"tag-startups","14":"tag-sweden","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-unicorns","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom","20":"tag-venture-capital","21":"tag-vibe-coding"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}