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

Lovable, 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 active users number the company shared in July. Osika said the company — which was founded almost exactly one year ago — is also seeing “100,000 new products built on Lovable every single day.”

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 — potentially sparked by its own investors — that new backers want to invest at a $5 billion valuation, though Osika said the company isn’t capital constrained and declined to discuss fundraising plans.

Speaking to me onstage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, Osika notably didn’t mention another number: Lovable’s current annual recurring revenue. The company, which uses a mix of free and paid tiers, hit $100 million in ARR this June, a milestone it shared publicly. But questions have emerged since about whether the vibe coding boom is sustainable.

Research from Barclays this summer, along with Google Trends data, showed that traffic to some of the buzziest services, including Lovable and Vercel’s v0, had declined after peaking earlier this year. (Traffic to Lovable was down 40% as of September, according to the Barclays analysts.) “This 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,” they reportedly wrote in a note to investors.

Still, Osika said retention remains strong, citing more than 100% net dollar retention — meaning users spend more over time. He also said the company has “just passed” the 100-employee mark and is now importing leadership talent from San Francisco to bolster its Stockholm headquarters.

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’t know how to code. “I woke up a few days after building GPT Engineer and I realized, look, we’re going to reimagine how you build software,” Osika said. “I biked to my co-founder’s place, and I said, I have this great idea. I woke him up.”

The platform has attracted an eclectic user base. More than half of Fortune 500 companies are using Lovable to “supercharge creativity,” 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.

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

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.

“The part of the engineering organization where we’re moving the quickest on hiring is security engineers,” he said, adding that his goal is to make building with Lovable “more secure than building with just human-written code.” In fact, he said, before users can deploy, Lovable now runs multiple security checks, though the platform still requires users building sensitive applications — banking apps, for instance — to hire security experts, just as they would with traditional development.

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. “If 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.”

It’s a decidedly collegial stance in an industry not known for it. (Even Osika has engaged in some light social media sparring with Amjad Masad of competitor Replit.) But he said his focus right now is on building “the most intuitive experience for humans” 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 deploying mission-critical features, can be done through a simple interface.

“Demo, don’t memo,” 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.

For all the hypergrowth and investor attention, Osika — dressed simply in a beige T-shirt and matching button-down, floppy hair framing his face — appeared very much at ease. The 30-something former particle physicist, who was the first employee at AI company Sana 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’s trajectory or the attention suddenly being showered on him.

“What I care about is that everyone who’s at the company, they’re mission driven, they really care about what they’re doing and how we as a team succeed,” he said, pushing back against Silicon Valley’s intensifying hustle culture. “The best people in my team today, most of them, they have kids, and they really, really care about what we’re doing. They’re not working 12 hours, six days a week.”

Though he added: “Although it’s a startup, so they’re probably working more than most jobs.”