Swedish founders Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin launched Lovable to help people build software with AI. Two years later, the startup has reached $400 million ARR.
One morning in February, inside a startup office in Stockholm, a dashboard refreshed and landed on a number most young AI companies only talk about chasing: $400 million in annual recurring revenue.
Lovable got there with surprisingly little fanfare. In a moment defined by flashy demos and relentless AI hype, its rise points to something more durable – and offers a glimpse of how the next generation of AI companies might actually be built.
Today, it sits in the middle of a crowded new category that investors and founders keep calling “vibe coding,” shorthand for software built through conversation with AI.
And while that label has indeed traveled fast, revenue has traveled faster. TechCrunch reported that Lovable added $100 million in revenue in a single month, with just 146 employees – a headline that follows a sequence of milestones that reads like a cadence.
The Stockholm AI startup reached $100 million ARR in July 2025, $200 million in November, $300 million in January 2026, and $400 million in February.
Inside the AI startup behind the “vibe coding” boom
The company’s origin story carries more friction than the headline suggests. Lovable launched in late 2024, co-founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, with a product aimed at helping non-technical users build software.
Inside Lovable’s own writing, the early period looks like a workshop floor: rough cuts, misreads, and repeated rebuilds.
In a post about its early go-to-market, Lovable said the first two launches missed, and it lists the causes with engineerly bluntness – assumptions made before validation, a brand that felt gimmicky, and timing that failed to connect with how the market was moving.
From there, the work became procedural. The two-year-old startup has described scrappy experimentation, a search for product-market fit, and changes that make the product easier to understand and adopt.
Distribution has revealed itself as craft, too. There have been repeated attempts to get the product in front of the people most likely to build with it, and enough attention to clarity in onboarding and messaging that the first session produces something a user can keep.
Regardless, Lovable’s public narrative has long focused on everyday builders and momentum – a company trying to turn “idea to app” into a daily habit.
When the product started to prove itself
Behind the interface, Lovable relies on the large AI models that power much of today’s AI industry. Reports say the product uses Anthropic’s Claude as a core model, alongside other providers, placing it among a growing group of tools built on top of foundation models.
In that setup, the challenge isn’t just the AI itself, but how well the product works – the workflow, the reliability, and whether the results hold up in the real world.
For Lovable, that proof comes through usage. The platform now reportedly supports more than 200,000 new projects per day on average. On March 8, when it went free for a day, more than 500,000 projects were built or updated.
Looking ahead, the latest $400 million milestone lands as yet another major checkpoint for one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies – and it probably won’t be its last.
Steven Bartlett is an investor in both Founded and Lovable
