Oskar Munck af Rosenschöld never planned to be in show business. But over a fika (coffee break) in Stockholm, Sweden, a film producer friend pitched him on a startup idea: a marketplace to match films with financiers, helping European moviemakers with the neverending task of raising money.

Often such ideas never escape the talking stage. But just a few months later, FrameSage was live and had booked its first $50,000 in revenue—thanks to a new AI coding tool, Lovable, that Munck af Rosenschöld used to build the company’s plumbing in just 10 days.

“You feel like you have the magic key to build software,” says Munck af Rosenschöld, whose works as a project mana­ger at a pharma company by day and who had never coded before outside of school. “This has saved us tens of thousands of dollars on developers and around four months’ work.”

Munck af Rosenschöld isn’t the only young founder to have fallen for Lovable, Sweden’s new AI unicorn. In June alone, around 750,000 projects—apps, websites, entire businesses—were built, hosted and launched with a handful of descriptive sentences and a few clicks on Lovable. This isn’t like the clunky website builders of yesteryear, responsible for zillions of personal sites; nor are they sketches or wireframes that might look cool but aren’t functional. Lovable projects, spun up in minutes thanks to generative AI, are actual working products with features ranging from email newsletters to payments via Stripe.

“I was shown Lovable and knew what I was going to do for the coming years,” says Malmö, Sweden–based Jaleel Miles, who built his restaurant management startup, Quicktables, in just two months on Lovable. He has booked over $120,000 in sales from the site since May.

Lovable has become the fastest-growing software startup in history, reaching $100 million in subscription revenue (on an annualized basis) in just eight months since its launch last November, eclipsing other rocketships like Israeli cloud security startup Wiz and San Francisco–based HR platform Deel (which hit the same benchmark in 18 months and just under two years, respectively). “Humans are builders at heart, but being able to write code, or having access to capital, has been the defining part of being able to build software,” says cofounder and CEO Anton Osika, 34, who started Lovable in September 2023. “Now we are entering a new era.”

It’s not just scrappy young founders who are building on Lovable. Rio de Janeiro–based QConcursos has about 200 staff helping Brazilian students prepare for college and civil service exams. CEO Caio Moretti says he used Lovable to spin up a new premium version of its app in just two weeks. It made over $3 million in its first 48 hours. “If we were coding on our legacy platform it would have taken us a year to build a new product,” he says.

It was a pickleball tournament tracking app that did it for Accel partner Ben Fletcher. The London-based investor built the gadget on Lovable in a weekend, then spun up a tool that helps Accel sift through startup sales data. He’s now leading a $200 million round in the Swedish startup, which values the 45-person company at $1.8 billion (its cofounders’ estimated 50% stake is jointly worth $900 million). “We see Lovable as an opinionated CTO that builds your product for you,” says Osika, who has just started writing his own small checks into Lovable’s most promising projects.

That $200 million, on top of the $23 million it raised previously, should help Lovable fend off competition from well-funded Bay Area rivals like Replit (which last raised $97 million at a $1.2 billion valuation) and StackBlitz—which raised $105 million in January and is on this year’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. But it’s not just other upstarts Lovable needs to worry about. AI giants OpenAI and Google, whose Firebase Studio can build apps and websites from prompts in simple English, are also interested in the so-called “vibe coding” market.

The same tech that’s powering Lovable and its rivals is also sweeping through Silicon Valley’s professional ranks. Startups like Cursor, Cline and Cognition’s code writing tools for pro programmers are transforming how tech is built. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella claims that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by AI. Google’s Sundar Pichai, who has made similar claims, reportedly just spent $2.4 billion to poach the founders of Windsurf to pump up Google’s AI code tools. Once-coveted software engineers were reportedly caught up in recent layoffs at both companies. Venture fund SignalFire, which tracks tech recruitment, saw hires for entry-level coders drop by a quarter last year.

But Lovable doesn’t pretend to cater to the pros. Its fans are tinkerers, designers and entrepreneurs. “Developers are really important, but they’re only 1% of the market,” Fletcher says.

For entrepreneurs like Theresa Anoje, who had never coded anything beyond tweaks to her Tumblr page, Lovable has been a game changer. For years, the San Francisco–based founder wanted to build her careers newsletter, Remotely Good, into a full-fledged job-hunting website but had hit a wall with fundraising and scaling up. Then she built a new website in just a weekend with Lovable. “It was an enormous relief,” she says. “It was a revelation.”

Lovable lets anyone make a handful of simple projects for free, but more-complex features and AI code requests can be unlocked with fees star-ting at $25 per month. Building something like the classic cellphone game Snake would cost the equivalent of a buck in Lovable credits, while a more-elaborate app could run upward of $50. That’s still less than the hourly rate of even humdrum human programmers.

Osika himself didn’t start out as a coder, even though he’s been programming since age 12 the same type of simple games that Lovable can now build in minutes. He studied physics at Sweden’s elite KTH Royal Institute of Technology and then joined CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, in Switzerland. He lasted only a few months; CERN had a thousands-strong army of the best physicists in the world, but Osika quickly started to think the slow grind on “impossible projects” like hunting dark matter was a waste of human potential. “The realization was that you have much, much more impact being in industry, building companies,” he says.

After a stint at Stockholm-based proprietary trading firm Ampfield, Osika joined an education AI startup in 2017, then signed on as cofounder and CTO at Depict AI, helping cofounder

Oliver Edholm sell an Amazon-style product recommendation algorithm to retailers. They joined startup hothouse Y Combinator and within a year generated $1 million of revenue, raising

$17 million in 2022 from big-name investors like Tiger Global. But Depict’s growth fizzled along with pandemic e-commerce mania, and AI began to catch fire with the launch of ChatGPT. “I was thinking, ‘We have to do this at Depict, or I have to find a way to leverage this huge wave that is coming toward us,’ ” Osika says.

He was so sure of the potential that he built an AI tool dubbed GPT Engineer in his spare time, publishing it to developer platform Github in June 2023. When the app shot to the top of Github’s trending page almost overnight, Osika knew he was on to something. So he quit, recruiting former Depict staffer Fabian Hedin to be his cofounder and CTO. The duo decided to turn his code-heavy GPT Engineer into a visual tool that anyone could use. “There was this realization that this was extremely powerful,” Hedin says. They raised an $8 million seed round led by venture fund Hummingbird in October 2023.

When the first version of Lovable flopped, they rewired it to handle more than simple games or static websites. Lovable raked in more than $5 million in just over a month after the team relaunched in November 2024.

Lovable is now booking around $1 million a day in subscriptions, but competition is fierce. Its focus on portfolio sites and simple prototypes puts it on a collision course with an earlier generation of unicorns like Figma and website builders such as Wix and Squarespace. All these companies are also building their own AI tools. Figma launched a code generator earlier this year, and in June, Nasdaq-listed Wix spent $80 million to buy a six-month-old AI coding startup.

Lovable has limitations. It aces web design, but the plumbing of more complex apps still needs a human touch. For Dutch AI engineer Lennert Jansen, a Lovable-built prototype was enough to land a spot at Y Combinator for his startup Airweave, which helps connect apps like Gmail with autonomous bits of code called AI agents. Lovable struggled with the technical back end, so Jansen and his cofounder hand-coded it and have since rewritten the remaining Lovable code. Still, accelerating the early work meant serious time savings. “If we hadn’t had Lovable, it wouldn’t have given us this tangible starting point,” Jansen says. “It was a massive win with the speed this market moves.” Now Airweave is making $17,000 a month and just landed $6 million in funding.

Another vulnerability: Like many in its cohort of vibe-coding startups, Lovable relies on the same set of underlying AI models, notably Anthropic’s Claude. Lovable is spending millions of dollars a month on these models to power its coding. Some other startups are even heavier spenders, which has put Anthropic on track to make a reported $4 billion in revenue this year. Now Anthropic, last valued at $60 billion, is selling its own code tool directly.

Osika can’t do much about this competition other than to stick to building products that humans love and hop between AI models for the best and cheapest. “Humans understand humans,” he says, “and Lovable is this enabling tool to make ideas come to life in minutes.”