“Anyone can become a developer” – One of the most successful European AI startups has become worth more than six billion dollars
Programming (photo source Groomfeelar, Dreamstime.com)
A Swedish startup founded in 2023 ended up being valued at $6.6 billion based on a good-sounding promise: programming an app can become as simple a process as writing sentences. The company called Lovable has tripled its value in five months and has more and more customers.
After a funding round of 330 million dollars, the company ended up being valued at 6.6 billion dollars, writes the publication tech.eu. The lead investors in the round are CapitalG and Menlo Ventures' Anthology funds.
Lovable was founded in Stockholm in 2023 and released its first AI programming product at the end of last year, quickly attracting the attention of investors because this “tool” allows users with no technical experience to create fully functional apps and websites at low cost.
The company's slogan is “Create apps and websites by chatting with AI”.
Lovable says software engineering can become accessible to anyone by promoting “vibe-coding,” a process where the user describes in ordinary language the product they want to build or the software feature they want to create, and artificial intelligence writes the code needed to achieve that result.
The company also gave examples: a project that 20 people would have worked on for four weeks can be done in a few days with just four people.
“Our mission is to enable everyone to be a developer,” said CEO Anton Osika, quoted by Fortune.
He envisions a world where every company can build its own custom software, instead of depending on expensive products sold by big technology vendors. For example, instead of purchasing separate tools for customer relationship management and project tracking or inventory management, Osika hopes companies will use Lovable to build exactly what they need on demand.
The company reached 30,000 paying customers a few months after launching the product and annual revenues are around $200 million.
The tool uses the output of well-known AI models, such as those developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and then adapts the code to build the application requested by the user.
Photo source: Dreamstime.com
