Lovable Raises $400 Million at a $13.3 Billion Valuation as 'Vibe Coding' Booms

# Lovable Raises $400 Million at a $13.3 Billion Valuation as 'Vibe Coding' Booms

Eighteen months after it opened its doors to paying customers, a Stockholm startup that lets people build software by simply describing what they want is now worth more than most publicly traded software companies. On Wednesday, Lovable said it had raised $400 million in a Series C round that values the company at $13.3 billion — roughly double the $6.6 billion valuation it commanded just eight months ago, and a staggering multiple of the $1.8 billion it was worth last summer.

The round, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, with participation from Tencent, Balderton Capital and additional backers across Europe, Latin America and Asia. It cements Lovable's status as one of Europe's most closely watched artificial intelligence companies — and as the poster child for the fast-growing, deeply contested market that its founders helped name: "vibe coding."

From prompt to product

The premise is disarmingly simple. Instead of writing code, a Lovable user types a description of the website or app they want — a booking page for a hair salon, an internal dashboard for a sales team, a landing page for a new product — and the platform's AI models generate a working application. The term "vibe coding," popularized in early 2025, captures the shift: users describe the vibe, and the machine handles the syntax.

Lovable, founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin and launched commercially in late 2024, has ridden that shift to one of the fastest revenue ramps the software industry has seen. The company says it was the fastest software startup ever to climb from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, hitting that mark within eight months of launch. It crossed $400 million in ARR in February — adding roughly $100 million in a single month at the time, with a team of just 146 employees — and the company now projects revenue reaching $600 million by the end of this month. By late 2025 it was approaching 8 million users and had surpassed 100,000 paying subscribers.

"This funding lets us move faster on the product, infrastructure, and team needed to make Lovable the best place to build and run a business," Osika said in a statement accompanying the raise.

Why investors keep doubling down

For Menlo Ventures, the check is a conviction bet on who gets to make software. "From the very start, Lovable was built for the billions of people with the creativity and knowledge to make something, but who had always been blocked by technical ability," said Matt Murphy, a partner at the firm, which also backed Lovable's earlier rounds.

The European angle matters, too. Victor Englesson, a partner at EQT and co-head of the Scaleup Europe Fund, called Lovable one of the most ambitious and fastest-growing AI companies the firm has seen, saying the investment "reflects exactly why the Fund was established: to help Europe's most ambitious technology companies become global leaders." Osika has repeatedly credited staying headquartered in Stockholm, rather than decamping to San Francisco, as part of the company's edge in recruiting and focus.

Lovable's fundraising cadence has been relentless. A $15 million round led by Creandum in February 2025 gave way to a $200 million Series A from Accel in July at a $1.8 billion valuation, then a $330 million Series B in December — with CapitalG, Menlo, and the venture arms of Google and Nvidia participating — at $6.6 billion. Wednesday's round is the company's fourth in roughly 18 months.

A crowded, richly funded battlefield

The bull case is also the bear case: everyone wants this market. Lovable competes not only with fellow startups like Replit and coding-tool darling Cursor, but with the largest companies in AI — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft, all of which are pushing their own natural-language software-building tools. The open question is whether AI app-building is a winner-take-all category or one large enough to support several giants. Lovable's investors are betting on the latter, wagering that a horizontal platform aimed at non-developers can coexist with tools optimized for professional engineers.

Lovable is trying to widen its moat by moving upmarket. The company now names Adidas, Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom among enterprises whose teams build internal software on the platform, and Osika has signaled that winning larger corporate customers — with their demands for security, reliability and support — is central to the next chapter. Its pitch is shifting from "build an app" to "build and run a business," a framing that implies hosting, payments and operations, not just code generation.

What to watch

The numbers are dazzling, but so is the risk. Lovable's revenue and valuation both rest on AI models it largely does not own, leaving margins exposed to the pricing decisions of the very hyperscalers it competes against. Retention among casual "vibe coders" is unproven at scale, and enterprise sales cycles move far slower than the viral consumer growth that got Lovable here. The next test is whether a company that made software creation feel effortless can make its own business durable — and whether $13.3 billion looks visionary or vertiginous a year from now.