Lovable says it’s nearing 8 million users as the year-old AI coding startup eyes more corporate employees

Sweetthe Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is approaching 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a sit-down on Monday, a big jump from the 2.3 million active user count the company shared in July. Osika said the company – which was founded almost exactly a year ago – is also seeing “100,000 new products being built on Lovable every day.”

The numbers indicate rapid growth for the startup, which has raised a total of $228 million in funding to date, including a $200 million round this summer that valued the company at $1.8 billion. Rumors have circulated in recent weeks – possibly fueled by its own investors – that new backers are looking to invest at a $5 billion valuation, although Osika said the company has no capital constraints and declined to discuss fundraising plans.

When Osika spoke to me on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, she didn’t mention another number in particular: Lovable’s current annual recurring revenue. The company, which uses a mix of free and paid tiers, reached $100 million in ARR in June, a milestone it publicly proclaimed. But since then, questions have been raised about whether the vibe-coding boom is sustainable.

Research from Barclays this summer, along with data from Google Trends, showed that traffic to some of the most popular services, including Lovable and Vercel’s v0, had declined after a peak earlier this year. (According to Barclays analysts, traffic to Lovable was down 40% as of September.) “This declining traffic raises the question of whether app/site vibecoding has already peaked or has just stalled for a while before rates rise,” they reportedly wrote in a note to investors.

Still, Osika emphasized that retention remains strong, citing a net dollar retention of more than 100% – meaning users are spending more over time. He also said the company “just crossed the 100-employee mark” and is now importing leadership talent from San Francisco to strengthen its Stockholm headquarters.

Lovable grew out of GPT Engineer, an open source tool Osika built that went viral among developers. But he says he quickly realized that 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 realized, look, we’re going to reimagine how you build software,” Osika said. “I rode my bike to my co-founder’s house and said, I have a great idea. I woke him up.”

The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies use Lovable to boost creativity, Osika said. At the same time, he said, an 11-year-old in Lisbon was building a Facebook clone for his school, while a Swedish duo is making $700,000 annually from a startup they launched on the platform seven months ago.

“What I hear from people who try Lovable is, ‘It just works,’” said Osika, who credited what he described as a Swedish design sensibility.

Security remains a trickier issue for the vibe encryption industry. When I brought up a recent incident where an app built with vibe encryption tools leaked 72,000 images into the wild, including GPS data and user IDs, Osika acknowledged the problem.

“The part of the tech organization where we are hiring the fastest is security engineers,” he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable “more secure than building with only human-written code.” Before users can deploy, Lovable now performs multiple security checks, although the platform still requires users building sensitive applications (banking apps, for example) to hire security experts, just as they would with traditional development.

Osika was equally matter-of-fact when I asked about competition from OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI ​​giants whose models power Lovable but who have also released their own coding tools. He sees the market as big enough for multiple winners. ‘If we can unlock more human creativity and human agency… and drive change so that everyone can create if they have good ideas, [and] on top of that, building companies that should be celebrated, regardless of who does it.”

It is certainly a collegial attitude in an industry that is not known for that. (Even Osika has dabbled in some light sparring on social media with Amjad Masad of competitor Replit.) But he said his focus 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 business-critical features, can be done through a simple interface.

“Demo, don’t memo,” a popular phrase among product leaders, reflects how companies are using Lovable now, he said. Employees can now quickly prototype ideas instead of writing long presentations, then test them with early users before deploying resources.

Despite all the growth and attention from investors, Osika – dressed simply in a beige T-shirt and matching loose, limp hair framing his face – seemed very comfortable. The 30-year-old former particle physicist, who was the first employee at Sauna Labs before founding Lovable, has quickly gone from open source developer to venture-backed founder and indispensable conference guest. Yet he seemed more interested in discussing European work culture than dwelling on his company’s trajectory or the attention suddenly focused on him.

“What I care about is that everyone who works at the company is mission-driven, really cares about what they do and how we succeed as a team,” he said, railing against Silicon Valley’s growing hustle culture. “The best people on my team today, most of them, have children, and they really, really care about what we do. They don’t work 12 hours, six days a week.”

Although he added, “Even though it’s a startup, they probably have more work than most jobs.”