Fast-growing AI startup Lovable is considering opening an office in London in a bid to poach top engineering talent as it scales its team.
The Stockholm-based company, which has built an AI tool that allows users with no coding experience to build websites in minutes, announced earlier this week it had reached $50m in annual recurring revenue. That’s more than double the $17m it was making less than three months ago, when it was already referred to as the fastest-growing startup in Europe.
Lovable is rapidly expanding its team. In February, it had 17 employees; today it has 30. It plans to continue growing, and cofounder and CEO Anton Osika tells Sifted he doesn’t want to poach talent from fellow AI startups in Stockholm.
“There’s a grey area, but the fact that I’m such good friends with the other AI startup founders [in Stockholm] is one of the main reasons I want to open an office and hire in London instead,” he says.
There is no set timeline for a UK expansion and Lovable continues to grow the team in Stockholm, where the company currently lists 10 open roles on its website.
Osika was previously the first employee at Swedish AI startup Sana Labs, where he built its engineering team. He says he can’t hire from there either. “I’m a shareholder,” he says.
Lovable has successfully hired talent from other tech companies, including Spotify and Stripe. It has also hired a number of former startup founders.
Following a €6.8m pre-seed round last October, led by Hummingbird and ByFounders, Sifted revealed details of Lovable’s $15m pre-Series A in February. The round was led by European VC Creandum and included notable angels such as Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf.
Asked whether a move to the US is on the horizon, Osika says it’s not the plan — but the company is considering opening an office there to be closer to its customer base.
“We have many customers in the US, so we need to be there too. But the core of the company will remain in Europe.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/lovable-plans-london-office-to-hire-engineering-talent/
