Anton Osika: how a weekend experiment became a $13bn company

The Swedish startup Lovable, not even three years old, has raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation (around 280 billion crowns) — twice what it was worth six months ago. Its founder, Anton Osika, together with his partner Fabian Hedin, has in that time become one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.

The story began almost three years ago with an ordinary weekend experiment: Osika wrote an AI-based coding tool and released it as open source. The project became one of the most popular on GitHub, and in November 2024 Osika and Hedin turned it into a company. According to Forbes, each of them now owns roughly 24% of Lovable.

The idea behind the service is simple: a user describes in plain text what they need, and Lovable builds a website or app out of it. This field is known as “vibe coding,” and Lovable is one of its leaders, competing with the American company Cursor, recently acquired by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Since launch, more than 60 million projects have been created on the platform, and the sites and apps built on it receive over 900 million visits a month. A year after launch, employees at half of the Fortune 500 companies were using Lovable; now it's two-thirds.

The company isn't just growing fast — it's also profitable: annualized revenue currently exceeds $500 million, around 10.5 billion crowns, with margins holding at about 65%. As recently as last December, Lovable closed a $330 million round at a $6.6 billion valuation — meaning the company's value doubled in just eight months, and grew more than sevenfold in thirteen.

What stands out about this latest round isn't so much the amount as who's investing. The European Union made a notable appearance for the first time: the €5 billion (around 120 billion crowns) Scaleup Europe fund was set up late last year specifically to stop Europe losing its best growth companies. The fund is managed by the investment firm EQT, and Lovable is only its second investment, after the space company ICEYE.

Osika long resisted pressure from investors urging him to move to Silicon Valley, and stayed in Stockholm instead. Today, alongside the German defense startup Helsing and the French company Mistral, his firm belongs to a narrow group of leaders on the European AI scene. With the new funding, Lovable plans to grow its team to around 450 people, focusing mainly on hiring for engineering and product roles.