AI agents are getting VCs excited. Sifted data shows European companies in the sector picked up almost €500m in the first six weeks of 2025 alone. One of those startups is Stockholm-based Lovable, described as “the biggest story of the moment” by a person at a global LLM company.
On Tuesday, Sifted exclusively revealed details of Lovable’s new funding round, later confirmed as a $15m pre-Series A led by European VC Creandum, alongside angel investors like Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf.
The company has developed an AI tool that enables people without coding skills to create websites within minutes. Lovable was recently featured in a16z’s roundup of AI web app builders, published two weeks ago, and hosted a joint hackathon with the US-based VC firm and European VC Northzone as recently as last week.
Lovable is mainly creating headlines because of its impressive growth journey so far. Within three months since the launch, the Swedish startup has $17m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), 30k paying customers, and 25k apps being built on the platform daily.
That kind of ARR growth is unusual. Apart from Norwegian food delivery startup Oda — which hit €30m ARR in just three months in 2016 — these numbers make Lovable one of the fastest-growing startups in European history, according to the company.
“When we were in San Francisco, people kept on assuming that we’re based there, and they also don’t believe that you can build a company outside of this bubble. So I like to think that we’re proving them wrong right now,” Fabian Hedin told Sifted a couple of weeks ago.
A €6.8m pre-seed last year
In October last year, Lovable announced a €6.8m pre-seed round, led by Hummingbird and byFounders, with participation from angel investors including DeepMind operators, prominent founders of global AI companies and Creandum co-founder Stefan Lindeberg.
But even before the company emerged from stealth last year, VCs were already talking about Lovable — partly due to its CEO and cofounder, Anton Osika, who has been more visible than most other early-stage startup founders.
Lovable is not Osika’s first startup. He was one of the early employees at AI startup Sana and co-founded the AI company Depict, which has backing from investors such as Tiger Global, EQT Ventures, Northzone, and Y Combinator.
As the CTO at Depict, Osika created the first version of Lovable — originally a source-coding companion tool called GPT Engineer — to increase the productivity of the 15 engineers reporting to him.
“After a single tweet, GPT Engineer became the most popular AI code generation GitHub project, almost overnight. And I became a celebrity—not just among engineers—but among all top global VCs and even the taxi drivers I met in San Francisco,” Osika told me in an email last year.
At the end of 2023, Osika left Depict to focus solely on Lovable. In 2024, Lovable was accepted to Y Combinator, however, it turned it down.
“YC is amazing. However, since we believe in building from Europe and care about dilution in the company, we got better deals that better fit the needs of the business,” Osika says.
Visiting Lovable’s office
Meeting with co-founder Hedin and designer Nad Chishtie at a coworking space in Stockholm , Hedin picks a smoothie out of the fridge and remarks that the office space is really good value for money considering how many hours they spend in it.
At the time of the interview, Lovable had yet to announce it had just raised $15m in a pre-Series A round. Even so, for every founder, raising capital is a full time job.
“I think the biggest problem with raising money is that it takes focus from building the product,” Hedin says.
“We have competitors who have done that,” Chishtie adds. “They’ve raised big war chests, and they’re scaling the teams or whatever, and they have worse products. The things that are driving us instead are the power of small teams, the power of individual empowerment, where everybody can ship end to end and improve the product every day.”
If you’re building a landing page, we got you covered
The website builder is constantly evolving — sometimes updated 20–50 times a day, Chishtie says. He shows off the prompts needed to build an e-commerce website for selling longevity supplements, and within minutes, I could see a preview and select designs suited to my style. However, for building more complex projects, there are still challenges to overcome.
Speaking with a startup founder in Stockholm working on a new healthtech venture, she mentions that she used Lovable to build her website. She is one of many relying on AI not just for simple software development but also for future digital interfaces.
“If you’re building a landing page, we got you covered”, Hedin says, “you don’t have to go to Wix or Webflow or whatever you would have done before – the AI can do this quite pain-free. But if you would be building Lovable, then you would probably hit some obstacles on the way.”
“For me, it’s a lot about pushing the boundary of what you can build with Lovable and the more we do that, the more people we can serve, and the more ideas we can turn into reality.”
A month ago, the company was hiring and posted a picture on LinkedIn of four men in bathrobes—perhaps not the most female-friendly portrayal of workplace culture.
Sweden, although a society associated with gender equality, still has a tech and startup sector that is very male-dominated. For the Lovable team, it wasn’t apparent how the post would be perceived. “Not until we got the feedback about it,” says Hedin, adding, “We still have things to improve on.”
Of the company’s 17 employees, only two are women.
“The last two women that joined and the first two women that joined, they said that part of the reason why they joined was that they saw the name and the logo as a heart, in a very male-dominated industry,” Chishtie says. “From the top down, from day one, the intent is there. It’s just that we haven’t quite got that balance right so far.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/is-ai-agent-lovable-europes-fastest-growing-software-startup/
