People in San Francisco venture capital love to talk about being contrarian. But in chasing contrarianism, they often miss what actually makes a company different. What’s genuinely unusual isn’t building the next AI startup in the shadow of South Park or naming your company after a quantum particle. It’s launching an AI-native software platform in Stockholm, giving it a name like “Lovable,” and opening the books publicly not to flex funding rounds, but to show paying customers, real usage, and revenue.
That’s exactly what Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin have done. Their startup, Lovable, has become Europe’s fastest-growing AI company and one of its most valuable after closing a $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation. The round, led by Accel, is the largest Series A ever raised by a Swedish software company. It also vaults Lovable into unicorn territory just eight months after its public launch in November 2024.
The numbers are staggering by any standard. The platform now serves over 2.3 million active users across 190 countries and claims more than 180,000 paying subscribers. It reached $75 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within seven months of going live. For context, when Lovable raised a $15 million round led by Creandum in February 2025, it had already hit $17 million in ARR with 30,000 subscribers all built with just $2 million in spend.
“We met Anton and Fabian before Lovable as we know it existed: no public product, no pitch deck, just two ridiculously talented builders with a huge vision to build the last piece of software,” one early investor said. “We backed them on day zero.”
Lovable was founded to bring software creation to the rest of the world for the 99% who don’t know how to code but have ideas. The product lets users describe what they want to build in plain language, a budgeting app, a food planner, a career tracker and instantly returns a functional, production-ready application with full backend and integrations. “Lovable isn’t just about writing code,” the company said earlier this year. “It’s about making software creation accessible to everyone.”
At a time when most AI coding tools, like Cursor and Replit, target developers and engineering teams, Lovable’s explosive growth has been powered by non-technical users. These users are building them, with no prior experience. In June alone, users built over 2.5 million websites with Lovable, representing more than 10% of all new websites on the internet that month. The company claims more than 10 million projects have been created to date, with over 90,000 being added each day.
This grassroots growth has been matched by rising enterprise adoption. Companies like Klarna, HubSpot, and the French photo-editing startup Photoroom are now customers. In one case, a large Brazilian edtech firm built and launched an app on Lovable that went on to gross $3 million within 48 hours. The company is also beginning to power an ecosystem: Osika recently became an angel investor in Stardust, an ad-testing startup that appears to have been built using Lovable.
“Every day, brilliant founders and operators with game-changing ideas hit the same wall: they don’t have a developer to realize their vision quickly and easily,” Osika said. “Lovable exists so that wall doesn’t exist anymore.”
Accel’s decision to lead the round reflects the firm’s conviction in Lovable’s category-defining potential. “Lovable is for the 99% of folks that have not had access to this ability to build before,” said Ben Fletcher, a partner at Accel.
The Series A round also attracted an elite lineup of strategic investors from across global tech. Among them: Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Sebastian Siemiatkowski (Klarna), Job van der Voort (Remote), Linda Tong (Webflow), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Melissa Tan (Canva), Paul Copplestone (Supabase), Victor Riparbelli and Steffen Tjerrild (Synthesia), George Kurtz (CrowdStrike), and Nik Storonsky (Revolut) via QuantumLight Capital. Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen and Zalando’s Robert Gentz invested through European Tech Collective.
To date, Lovable has raised approximately $224 million in total funding. Prior to the $200 million Series A, the company had quietly pulled in just $22.5 million, making its growth curve even more unusual. It has reached a scale and pace that rivals some of the most celebrated AI tooling startups globally. Cursor, which recently raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation, and Replit, which raised $97 million in 2023, now have a formidable European peer.
Yet Lovable’s trajectory hasn’t been without friction. Earlier this year, a Semafor report alleged that apps created with Lovable had exposed user data due to security vulnerabilities. Osika denied that Lovable’s AI was the cause of the leak, but acknowledged the seriousness of the issue. “Over the past few months we have shipped several improvements to ensure that system reviews for security problems,” he said. “We need to get to a place where it requires extreme negligence by not listening to Lovable to create something that’s not secure.”
Security aside, what makes Lovable’s story so striking is how fundamentally it departs from the Valley formula. There is no Silicon Valley office, no flood of press stunts, and no obsession with AI benchmarks. Instead, there is product velocity, community obsession, and a willingness to operate in public—often with uncomfortable transparency. Osika frequently posts revenue updates and subscriber counts directly to X, and the company openly shares how many projects are being built, by whom, and with what results.
The name itself, Lovable, was not meant to sound like a machine. It’s meant to feel human. “Picking a name that evokes emotion and hearts versus a name you’d see on the side of a spaceship of the future,” one investor said. “Founding and building in public, but publishing real revenue metrics and customer love instead of only fundraising metrics. That’s what actually being and thinking different looks like.”
Lovable’s emergence also marks a turning point for Sweden’s fast-rising AI scene. Stockholm, once seen as a home for consumer unicorns like Spotify, Klarna, and King, is now producing a new generation of AI-first companies. In May, legal AI startup Legora raised $80 million. In October 2024, AI agent platform Sana where Osika previously worked closed a $55 million round. “The average ambition level in Europe is much lower than the U.S,” Osika recently remarked, “but if we can ignite, we have more of the raw fuel to build a generational company.”
What Lovable has accomplished in less than a year is already rare. A consumer AI product, built in Europe, that scaled to over 2.3 million active users, 180,000 paying subscribers, and $75 million in annual recurring revenue all while remaining radically accessible to non-technical creators. It’s a pace and philosophy that sets it apart from its peers. Ben Fletcher noted, “Using Lovable feels magical. You describe your idea, and within minutes, it exists.”
And it didn’t need Silicon Valley to do it.
