The Idea
In June 2023, Anton Osika was a 32-year-old CTO at Depict, a Y Combinator startup in Stockholm selling AI product recommendations to e-commerce sites. GPT-4 had shipped three months earlier and Osika had spotted something nobody had properly tested. The model could write a decent function, but nobody had asked it to write an entire codebase from one sentence. He spent a weekend building a command-line tool that did exactly that, then pushed it to GitHub on a whim. It trended worldwide within days. Tens of thousands of stars followed, along with a waitlist of 27,000 people asking for a version that did not require a terminal. That waitlist was the real discovery. Copilot only helped people who could already code. No-code builders like Bubble collapsed the moment an idea needed a database. The gap sat between them: production-grade code, ordered by conversation. Days after posting, Osika rang Fabian Hedin early on a Saturday and asked him to go for a walk. This was the beginning of Lovable.
The Execution
- June 2023: Osika open-sourced GPT Engineer, which trended worldwide within days and pulled in tens of thousands of stars plus a 27,000-person waitlist for a non-technical version.
- November 2023: Osika and Hedin founded Lovable AB in Stockholm, with a $7.5m pre-seed from Hummingbird and byFounders following in October 2024.
- December 2024: The team renamed the product Lovable, wired in Supabase and relaunched. It topped Product Hunt and Hacker News on the same day and hit $4m ARR in four weeks.
- February 2025: Raised $15m led by Creandum at 500,000 users, 30,000 paying customers and $17m ARR, on a team of roughly 15 people.
- July 2025: Closed a $200m Series A led by Accel at a $1.8bn valuation, Sweden's largest round of its kind, eight months after relaunch. ARR crossed $100m in the same window, faster than Deel, Wiz or Cursor managed it.
- November 2025: ARR reached $200m with the platform nearing 8 million users and more than half the Fortune 500 using it somewhere in the business.
- December 2025: A $330m Series B co-led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures tripled the valuation to $6.6bn in five months, with the venture arms of Nvidia, Salesforce, Databricks and HubSpot all buying in.
- February 2026: ARR hit $400m on 146 staff, roughly $2.7m per employee, with $100m of that added in a single month. TIME named Lovable one of the 100 most influential companies in the world that April.
- June 2026: The company passed a $500m annualised run rate, with enterprise customers including Workday, Asana and Nvidia alongside millions of solo builders.
- August 2026: Lovable raised $400m at $13.3bn, led by Menlo Ventures and co-led by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund, with Tencent and Balderton joining. The money funds a push to 450 employees and offices in London, Boston, San Francisco and New York, less than three years after the company was founded.
The lesson?
Osika did not build a model. He built the layer on top of everyone else's models, four months after GPT-4 made whole-codebase generation possible, and aimed it at the 99% of people who cannot code. That is a market nobody could serve in 2022 and everybody wanted in 2024. Lovable went from $0 to $500m ARR with fewer people than most Series B companies have in sales. Being early to a capability beats being first to a category.