How a Czech HR lead built Lovable’s team from 20 to 300

Czech HR specialist Tereza Mačáčková is helping the Swedish startup Lovable — one of Europe’s hottest artificial intelligence companies — handle breakneck growth: in a single year the team has grown from 20 to 300 people, and the company’s valuation has reached almost CZK 280 billion.

Mačáčková joined Lovable last summer as the company’s first dedicated HR specialist and has been building hiring and related processes from scratch ever since. Since then the startup’s team has grown more than tenfold — Mačáčková admits she is still the only Czech at the company, though she’s trying to change that. “I know plenty of brilliant Czech engineers and designers, but convincing them to move to Stockholm isn’t that easy yet. So I’ve taken it a bit personally,” she laughs.

At the same time, she doesn’t hide the fact that working at a startup of this scale isn’t for everyone. “It’s very intense. And I really wouldn’t want to romanticise it. The ambitions are absurdly high, everything changes very fast, and it’s not an environment for everyone,” she says, describing the company’s atmosphere.

Lovable made its name as one of the pioneers of so-called vibe coding — an approach that lets people build apps and software using plain speech, with no coding knowledge required. Today the startup is aiming to move beyond quick prototyping and is targeting users who want to build and grow real products and entire businesses over the long term.

The company isn’t even three years old, but since winter its valuation has doubled following an August funding round, reaching a dizzying CZK 280 billion. In May Lovable hit an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $500 million, and according to earlier figures it maintains a profit margin of around 65%. Amid frequent criticism that Europe can’t produce major AI players, many point to Lovable as proof of the opposite.

Mačáčková is optimistic about the future: in her view, AI is closing the gap between Europe and Silicon Valley in access to capital and the ability to scale. “A team of forty people in Stockholm, Prague or Lisbon can today build things that, just a few years ago, would have needed hundreds of people and far more funding. That’s exactly what excites me about Lovable,” she says.

Despite the high ambitions and intense pace, the company tries to keep a comfortable atmosphere. “You walk into the Stockholm office, take off your shoes, and everyone walks around the office in socks. There are rugs, Scandinavian lamps, warm lighting, shared lunches and, of course, fika,” she says, referring to the Swedish tradition of gathering over coffee and something sweet just to chat with colleagues.

Lovable’s corporate culture is built on a high level of trust and so-called ownership — a sense of personal responsibility typical of fast-growing tech companies. “When you see something that could be done better, the instinct is to ‘go and do it’ rather than ‘wait for someone to give permission’,” Mačáčková explains.

The company largely works in an offline format. It’s not that remote work is impossible — it’s more about optimising processes. “In a single day in the office you pick up as much context as would otherwise take ten Slack threads and five scheduled calls. But the real value of the office is the conversations that would never make it onto a calendar,” she adds.