Every seat in Copenhagen’s Bella Center was full as Anton Osika, the co-founder of the vibe coding app Lovable, took the stage at this year’s TechBBQ conference.
Lovable specializes in helping people build apps and websites, especially people with no coding experience. It’s one of the standouts in the popular AI category known as vibe-coding, which lets users guide AI models as they produce code, websites, or whole applications.
It’s been an attractive proposition for users: In just eight months, the Swedish company said it surpassed $100 million in ARR and raised a $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation – making it Europe’s fastest-growing unicorn. The Financial Times reported that investors are already hoping to launch a Series B, offering deals that would value the company at $4 billion. So far, there’s no indication that Lovable is interested.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Osika laid out a vision for Lovable as the best place to build software products: a platform that can take users, founders, specifically, through all the stages of product development. so they can build AI-native companies more easily.
“If you’re running a business, there are a lot of things you want to set up, like payments, understanding your users, and in the future, maybe even like ‘I need to incorporate my company,’” he said. “I want Lovable to help with all these things.”
In late June, Lovable released an agent to help users read files, debug errors, search the web, generate images, and locate files – a first step in making good on that vision.
Lovable now has more than 2.3 million active users, 180,000 of which are paying subscribers. Osika said the company chose its pricing simply by deciding what would help the company cover its own costs. His favorite Lovable use cases include a marketer building a sales training platform and an engineer running multiple small businesses on the platform.
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“In the past, you could create a really great first draft using Lovable. Now, you can build a full product and it’s much more like working with a real developer,” he said.
AI-generated code has been criticized as overly brittle – better suited for demos than finished products – but Osika says he’s not concerned. All code should be reviewed before it is published, the CEO told us, “whether it is AI or human-generated.”
Right now, Lovable operates on other foundational models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-5. There is some tension to that relationship, as Anthropic and OpenAI both operate their own product-development services: Claude Code and Codex, respectively. Those systems aren’t exactly the same as Lovable, but it’s easy to imagine either model company trying to steal Lovable’s users with a strategic product shift.
So far, Osika doesn’t seem worried. He told TechCrunch that Lovable is simply focused on building the best product and is able to do that by leveraging all the different types of AI model providers, whereas providers need to stick to their own models.
“That puts us in a better position than them,” he continued, later adding that tapping into numerous foundation models gives its users “unmatched capabilities,” while also giving the company the flexibility to grow rapidly without carrying the weight of duplicative infrastructure.
“The scope of what you can achieve is constantly expanding,” he continued. To beat the competition, he says the team focuses on three things: how to remain fast and secure while providing an easy user experience.
“If we continue to do that, we’re going to build more trust with our customers than anyone else,” he said. “Simple as that.”
It’s only one month since Figma, one of Lovable’s peers in the app-design space, launched its blockbuster IPO, reaching a $19.3 billion market cap on its opening day. When asked about Figma, Osika simply said the company is still focused on making the best product for its users.
“As long as we are listening to our users and giving them what they need, that’s all that matters,” he said.
Already, Lovable is deeply tied to the Swedish tech market. Osika grew up in Stockholm and founded the company there. The company’s list of investors, according to Pitchbook, include a list of top European firms and angel investors, like Stefan Lindeberg (Swedish, Nordic Game Ventures); Fredrik Hjelm (Swedish, founder of Guestit), Greens Ventures (Nordic), Hummingbird Ventures (London); 20VC (London, founded by Harry Stebbings who launched Project Europe to funnel more investments into the ecosystem).
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky, who is based in Europe, is also an angel investor in the company, as is Swedish founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, whose company Klarna is also a client of Lovable. Other well-known clients include HubSpot and Photoroom.
All around the conference, investors and founders lamented what the company staying in Europe means for the, specifically, Nordic, startup ecosystem.
“The success of Lovable and other European AI unicorns is a success for all of Europe,” Shamillah Bankiya, a principal at the UK’s Dawn Capital, told TechCrunch. Though not an investor, her firm has followed Osika as a founder for a while and has invested in other AI companies through Dawn.
“Beyond the immediate impact of the thousands of Europeans employed by these companies, the greater effect is cultural,” she continued. “It raises the bar for what ambitious founders across the continent can dream of and achieve.”
Osika said Lovable plans to stay nestled in Europe, though it does have a team in Los Angeles. Many European tech companies eventually find themselves migrating to the States for more capital and access to opportunities – but Osika doesn’t see Lovable as one of them, for now.
In the wake of Lovable’s success, Osika has started to invest in those founders himself. Dennis Green-Lieber’s Danish consumer intelligence company, Propane.ai, just received an investment from Osika as part of its $1.2 million seed round. Green-Lieber said that Lovable proves what many in the Nordic scene already feel: They, too, have world-class talent and can play on the global stage.
“Yes, we’ve had giants like Zendesk, Unity, Klarna, and Spotify over the past decade, but what Lovable shows is that with small teams, a global mindset, and relentless effort, you can still build a category-defining company,” he continued. “As a founder, I can say it’s lit a fire in our ecosystem to see this happen right here at home.”
