Lovable cofounders and new billionaires Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Sebastian Nevols for Forbes
Lovable’s cofounders are now billionaires, after the popular ‘vibe coding’ startup raised a new round that vaulted its valuation to $6.6 billion, tripling in less than six months. In July, it became the fastest growing software startup in history.
The Stockholm-based company announced Thursday it had raised $330 million in a funding round led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, with participation from firms including Khosla Ventures, Accel and EQT. The new round brings the startup’s total funding to $550 million.
Forbes estimates cofounders Anton Osika, 35, and Fabian Hedin, 26, each have an approximate 24% stake in the company, putting their net worths at $1.6 billion. Hedin’s new fortune makes him one of Europe’s youngest self-made billionaires, falling just a few months behind another Swedish AI researcher Arvid Lunnemark, cofounder of AI coding tool Cursor, who became a billionaire in November at age 26. Hedin joins only 12 other self-made billionaires in the world under the age of 30.
Both founders plan to give away 50% of their earnings from any exit to charity. “Me and Fabian have pledged a very large part of the value that we build up from Lovable will go to ensuring that humanity’s transition to super intelligent AI goes well, and it is good for the humans that live through it,” Osika told Forbes in July.
Lovable’s AI coding tool allows anyone to build websites and apps with just a written prompt. Osika started the company in 2023 after an AI coding tool that he’d built in his spare time shot to the top of developer platform GitHub’s trending page almost overnight. Seeing the immediate success of the tool, Osika recruited former colleague Hedin to be his cofounder and CTO and scored $8 million in seed funding from venture fund Hummingbird in October 2023. The duo went on to launch its ‘vibe coding’ tool in November 2024. Last month, Osika said the company had 8 million active users, more than triple its 2.3 million users in July when the company told Forbes it was booking around $1 million a day in subscriptions.
In July, Lovable reached $100 million in annualized subscription revenue within eight months of its launch, outpacing cloud security startup Wiz and HR platform Deel, which hit $100 million in annualized revenue in 18 months and just under two years, respectively. Direct competitor Replit reached $150 million in annualized revenue in September within one year of launching its AI coding tool.
AI coding tools have seen immense growth this year: Cursor raised $2.3 billion at a $30 billion valuation in November, making its four cofounders billionaires, while Cognition reached a $10.2 billion valuation after raising over $400 million in September. But Lovable differentiates itself from AI coding startups like Cursor and Cognition, which are geared toward professional programmers. Lovable has surpassed direct competitors that focus on the potentially much larger pool of users who can’t code, including Replit—which last raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation in September—and StackBlitz—which raised $105 million in January at an estimated $700 million valuation.
Still, competition remains hot as larger tech companies jump on board: Figma and Squarespace have built their own code-writing tools, while Wix acquired ‘vibe coding’ startup Base44 for $80 million in June. Google paid $2.4 billion in July to acquire the founders of ‘vibe coding’ tool Windsurf (the startup’s remaining assets were later bought by Cognition for an estimated $250 million), while OpenAI and Anthropic are selling their own coding tools directly.
“I think many of us are builders at heart but being able to write code, or having access to capital, has been the defining part of the digital world but now we are in a new era,” Osika said earlier this year.
