Lovable raises $400M Series C
lovable.dev
lovable.dev
That goes so well with "Lovable raises $400M Series C"
And it could also be argued that "serving 60 million projects" and scaling from there is a different game requiring more than a few clicks in a vibecoding platform
How many are bot visits per project?
Doesn't matter how many Lovable clones there are. Everyone knows the name Lovable.
This caters to the overwhelming majority who cannot use tools like Claude Code or that prefer an all in one solution.
Open source models only help Lovable improve its own margins. They can stop paying the Anthropic or OpenAI tax and tailor the models to exactly their use case and UX.
not really. maybe last year.
That's AI hallucination.
I can't bring myself to be bullish or bearish in such broad strokes.
Over the years, I have met and worked with a number of people who were "non-technical", but who nonetheless built their own internal rough software tools with a cobbled-together combination of spreadsheets and SaaS services, connected by something like Zapier. They are a particular kind of person, but I would not call all of them them "technical". They are experienced in their business domain, are detail-oriented, and are persistent in making improvements by any means they could.
I have seen those people be supercharged by AI app builders like Replit and Lovable, even if I don't personally have a need for either.
This might be a matter of definitions: Is such a person "technical" because they value systematizing human processes and put effort into it? Or is such a person "non-technical" because they are not experienced in software engineering best practices, or programming in the conventional sense?
In addition to the nature of the user, I suspect the fulcrum that success and failure rests on for these kinds of apps and tools is long-term maintenance. How frequent? How involved? How breaking are the changes? On this topic, there is a quote I think about a lot (paraphrased, and I forget who said it, or I would credit them):
>AI app builders mean that anyone can experience the joy of building software, but also that they will experience the joy of maintaining software.
Otherwise the single prompt stuff is fodder for a million clones.
Most devs weren't being paid out of that.
Fast food software will be cheaper (but not cheap, McDonalds is considered expensive in many countries).
The value of software will skyrocket and it will be hidden behind an API so to not be copied fast.
I think you are doing the equivalent of looking at a hockey stick graph and extrapolating to infinity on where we are headed. We are already hitting the asymptote and the line is starting to go horizontal. Theres plenty of gains to be had by current state of AI, I'm not trying to be a wet blanket. I just dont think those gains are going to be had by "the masses using AI". Its going to be highly technical people doing highly technical things at scopes and speeds previously unimaginable.
AWS has $100+bn reasons per year to not let that happen. As techies learned slowly through the evolution of the internet: political power > money > tech.
Then as soon as their agent hits the first bug "port already in use" they will run... Any brave soul who remains, after spending a whole day solving similar issues back to back, will be like "The port has been freed up, my nginx proxy has been configured, my nginx has been launched with systemd and my app server too! The socket ulimit has been increased, I still can't see my app!!!" Then Claude be like "Well of course, silly human! To achieve this simple task, you would have to update your security group inbound firewall rules, duh!"
Then the user be like "Claude, we fixed everything! I cannot see my app still!" Then Claude be like "You goofball, we didn't even get round to purchasing your domain name, moving it to CloudFlare DNS and configuring the A record, CNAME and AAAA record for IPv6 in your Zone file... Not to mention the MX record. You also need to obtain a signed SSL/TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt, then modify your nginx config to install the SSL certificate... Oh then we'll need to configure your nginx to act as a terminating reverse proxy for your WebSocket connection... Oh actually before we do any of that we should set up your schema validation logic and access control logic on your app server with rate limiting and backpressure monitoring... Then we'll set you up on Git version control with a CI/CD pipeline with precommit and PR hooks to run your test suite and code linting... Then we want to keep the registration and login flow of your app real simple, like stupid simple, so we'll get you a Keycloak instance acting as an OAuth2/OIDC identity provider for authentication with an email verification step which will involve us configuring the realm and creating an OAuth client and setting up the SMTP email server... Too easy!
I’d imagine they’re already working with folks like Stripe, AWS, etc on exactly this at the moment potentially? I guess that’s where Lovable comes in. And now the money makes sense. Do the raise and become an acquisition target so one of the labs doesn’t have to do it themselves.
Yes, they will be able to do this, but it's a lot of work, and Lovable has a pretty good head start.
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
If I enter the game and rotate my phone horizontally it kicks me back to the front page.
that implies that he's probably not paying for Lovable, and thus their 13B+ valuation is built on influencers and eyeballs?
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder and built the initial version for Lovable.
How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate?
What. Is. Happening?!
$13.3B valuation? They mention Adidas, Nvidia, etc but their “favorite” use cases are toy apps inside smaller firms.
The play here has to be “our model of building companies via agent workflows and websites is the best” otherwise TAM numbers are just nutty. Smoke it while you got it I guess and congrats on the raise!
worth the listen. They hit profitability because of their power users, who are a mixed bag of complete novices and expert SWE's, both of whom spend 10x+ the tokens of the average user. So, basically, their value prop and pricing have hit a sweet spot for a certain marketshare.
Lovable reported hitting $500M in annualized revenue last month and estimates $1B+ over the next year (https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/lovable-says-it-has-hit-50...)
So I’m going to say not too many.
This stuff isn't hard if you keep an open mind.
Also - profitability or margin makes a big difference. Most folks are capable of selling $2B for $1B. Obviously not the case here if they’re doing 500M on a 400M raise, but you get the point.
The raise is not a loan. They sold equity in the company.
Their revenue is already greater than $400mm
1. Dance school management SaaS
2. Classified sites for Netherlands
3. An old school website hosting service
All of these were built by entrepreneurs who do not have a tech background. And by no tech background, I mean most of them dont know github, some of them dont know reddit and some of them dont know linkedin. The way they 'backup' their work is by taking successive dumps of the entire folder on local.
They already know that the business of software is one of the better businesses out there. Till now the option they had was to outsource to a dev shop - which will set them back to $10k-$50k atleast - but they intutively understand that the business may or may not work. So they were on the fence.
Now they build themselves - each of the three above have spent around $2k-$5k on our platform over the last quarter. Some of the businesses are working, some not so much - some are trodding along. So these guys do some updates here and there - are figuring out marketing over time - but if it seems like its not taking off, they start building the next thing on their mind. And once they 'understand' a platform they stick to it. Couple of grands dropped to build their next idea is the cheapest they have ever paid.
Every generation is hailed as the end of all things, because it's always better than the previous one, but the core need they serve are the same.
These are all apps with multi-tenancy - database backed - payment integrations - the works. The classified site (marketcity.org) has features like user chats/dms, social media sharing, paid upgrades etc.
Actually now the capabilities are dramatically increasing - you can now vibecode like a python based image/video processing pipeline directly - all through a webapp. And very soon - something more ambitious, like finetune an LLM - again all through a simple chat webapp.
That's on you. Wix, framer and WordPress can do it easily
This is because even in most serious tech companies the main website is considered marketing rather than part of the product.
Well, it did the web site alright, the process was smooth. She even asked AI to translate stories and it just did.
But the problem is that it was not what I would call a static web site: it was React bullshit, a SPA. The content was actually in typescript !!! Given that it's not actually static content it won't get indexed.
(And I really doubt SSR would be a good solution here.)
Why do I think that? Because that's exactly what happened to regular webshit coding some decade+ ago. That's how SPAs were born. That's why React is a thing in the first place. Long time ago, someone figured how to make a complex app in a browser, then someone else figured some trivial aspect of the site looks nicer when done in JS (back in the ancient times where networking was slow and bandwidth was tight), and suddenly every static page everywhere got rewritten into a bloated SPA, and spawned a whole absurdly well-paid industry to support it.
They built something, it does what it's supposed to do. What do they care it's using react?
Last month I visited warehouse in Berlin.
People who work there(with no technical background) build over 15 lovable apps for themselves -> starting from checkin system, to very sophisticated dashboards.
Those were non technical people, and they did all with no engineers or IT.
Those apps they were using were better than 90% of internal apps I've seen in my career.
I actually got a Google search result back because a business's internal CMS and marketing systems had gotten indexed which had their full email list with the capabilities to delete and send newsletters. The email address I searched had subscribed to this business's newsletter which got it indexed
It appeared it was built by Lovable
I'm all for vibe coding too but there's a good chance when people do it they are leaking data like this
But then I remember all the absolutely horrible half finished internal software most companies have(never enough time, often afterthought, cutting corners etc) and then I saw those internal Lovable apps made by people who actually needed those.
And now it's not so clear anymore!
Half baked ugly app does by the engineer who doesn't need it and don't want to fix bug vs pretty Lovable app made by people who use it everyday.
It seems like "product development" to me and not vibecoding.
For me Vibe coding is mostly making apps via AI by people who have no domain knowledge in what they are doing or no technical expertise.
If you technical or do have tons of domain expertise in the are(like those warehouses worker that did things for themselves) - I wouldn't call it vibe coding personally.
It just regular product development in my eyes and i would try to separate two cases.
Recently I had a bug in a program I'm writing with Claude. I manually figured out the issue and gave it the steps to solve it. But the thing that surprised me is that the newest model immediately pointed out what the bug was (which I did not say) and it was not at all obvious, even from the steps I told it to take to fix it. Since then I've been being much 'lazier' with the models and having just as good of results.
No idea what Lovable adds to the picture. I always thought the site was a bit sketchy because of that. Prompt engineering has always been overblown, and they're just working as a middleman between people and Claude. But hey they now have $400M and I do not, so props to them.
However, when I looked underneath the code, it was a mess. Biggest problem I saw in the brief time I spent looking at it's internals was that it wasn't using foreign keys in database. Sales invoices had customer info duplicated, and not referenced from the customer table like any sane developer would do. Same thing with purchase orders and supplier info.
AI coded apps look great at surface level, but contains huge footguns underneath.
The limits are also restrictive unless you wanna empty your bank account. I guess cheaper than paying us full time though.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
I don't know what's taking Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, even AWS to build deployments themselves. There are only a handful of reference architectures for vibe-coded apps.
Do you have any real users yet?
I'm working on a open resource/compute provisioning protocol/system (not released yet), targeting both cloud platforms as well as internal, which may go hand-in-hand with what you're building.
I don't have any telemetry, so not sure about number of users. Based on issues filed, lots of users using the single node deployment (which is good enough for most use cases). Started with Streamlit/Gradio type apps, now users are actually using it for deploying vibe coded internal tools. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
Also does your git integration support self-hosted Bitbucket (I guess at the least generic git instance not just GitHub etc) ?
Also, pretty cool that you have a FastHTML spec.. I built this (well AI mostly did) with FastHTML: https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/
Also any feedback on the Git question?
I have tested with GitHub and GitLab. OpenRun uses the go-git library, so BitBucket should work, not tried it yet.
FastHTML is great for internal tools use case.
A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.
I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most.
That said, Replit, Lovable, Emergent are making hay till frontier labs dont release a wrapper agent app to do what they do.
I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most.
IE. they might not be comfortable with the terminal, messing with SQL databases, etc.
For someone like me who have developed production apps the old way, terminal-based agents with my chosen stack is my preferred way.
Why do investors put their money in companies create by people that have never developer even a real application?
50 years ago most people in the field were newbies because the field itself was totally new. So, all founders lacked experience as no-one had experience. Has not that changed? Aren't any software experts that can create new products anymore?
> Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders.
I'm pretty young (early 20s), but have been coding, reverse engineering, and hacking away for about 10 years at this point. It's not like they're funding middle school children, how is it possible? These tools are all so new.
Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition?
I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code.
And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand.
I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better.
So the assumptions seem to be: - Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise. - Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way. - LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result
Its a beautiful thing.
That's very valuable, I basically think (we) devs often overestimate the average persons willingness to learn tech. Similar to dropbox back in the days.
Of course nothing is stopping OpenAI, Claude to do literally the same, maybe they already have? I don't follow the scene that much.
With Claude Code etc. you still have to decide on a tech stack, frameworks or libraries to build on. Lovable is basically an agentic harness with Tanstack Start and Supabase setup for you + quick integrations for services online businesses typically use.
Basically like a JS dev boilerplate + agent in a box.
Their main advantage is they were kind of a first mover in that space before harnesses or agents etc. were even discussed.
CC is a horrible product for building a finished website. With CC you still have to host it somewhere. On Vercel, get a DB somewhere or tell it to use SQLite, which no one knows what that is. You have to install it and use a terminal which no one knows how to do. Even if you already know how to code, surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase. You might not use it, but for sure it is easier.
In terms of what products get built and how it's sustainable, think internal tools and what people who can't code would like to build but weren't able to.
Internal tools, things like CreatorIQ is ~$30k a year. It would be nice to make an internal tool just to manage the creators you have and save that money External Projects, A friend built a fantasy leauge for niche sports is making money on it.
I would love to hear the argument as to why CC is better for those two use cases when the products work great, its cheaper than CC (both are subsidizing so that is not a good rebuttal), and there is less maintenance (in the future, you could imagine loveable automatically sweeping projects for deps, security issues, etc)
I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised.
This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.?
Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!
What I'm struggling to understand is that _someone_ is paying, right? $400M is probably a lot more than a fraction of what people spent on javascript CRUD apps before? It seems more like centralization than anything else to me? What am I missing?
I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build
Of all my friends the ones actually gaining measurable value from LLMs are not product developers but rather entrepreneurs in some service business that have automated processes they previously needed to hire someone for.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.
"When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box."
With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out.
I rest my case, your honor.
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Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out.
It makes Squarespace look like a good product!
The entire tech sector seems to amount to entrenched mega corps and finance bros who know how to fill out the forms to automatically get a fancy university graduate with a CS degree a few million and split it 3-ways, 1/3 for finance bro, 1/3 for nepo baby cs graduate and 1/3 for the losers who implement 'the idea'.
24 months later, their headcount ballooned, they are now more than 1'000.
Product keeps soft pivoting every few months and no single mediocre application built on lovable has gained any traction whatsoever, not that I've heard of it.
I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs.
Lovable funding is insane. And scary.
I think it's Cursor's selling point.
Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using."
Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.
Gaining traction or having a large marketshare cannot be the USP.
"Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel. But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation. Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that.
When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before. That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps.
... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet. But some have stuck.
If you like running your business and want to keep what you built, don’t.
But the odds of your business catastrophocally collapsing on itself or being aggressively gutted in an acquisition would go sky high, and all those starry eyed people you recruited to help you along the way become way more like to encounter surprise layoffs or unexpected and severe equity dilutions.
A lot of it is really about where your heart is as a human. If you want to take a lucrative cut on selling an image to bigger and bigger investors and don't much care what happens to your idea or any of the "little people" along the way, then you probably should chase those funding rounds. But if you're actually passionate about your vision or have a more compassionate and paternalistic attitude towards the people you convince to work for you, you're doing the right thing with the bootstrapping.
(I'm sure you know all this, though. Nobody bootstraps without thinking about this stuff, and recongizing that that they just can't stomach the tradeoffs of doing otherwise.)
“An app to find dog friendly pubs”
Most of the ideas seemed more like a Google search than an app.
I have no doubt they are letting thousands of people write code faster than ever before, but what is that code worth and who would maintain it? Deploying an app is relatively expensive and time consuming vs just using the web or buying an app. Most people can’t be bothered to do that work (and rightly so) and most apps make very little money.
I expect this to be one of the casualties of the AI bubble, once people realise they didn’t really want to run a business based on their dream app.
Spacex even have multi model one
Disclaimer: I'm the founder and built the initial version for Lovable.
If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.
Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
- bolt is the best product out there. paste the same prompt and see for yourself
The fact that "1.2M projects" are made weekly yet seemingly none of consequence speaks for itself
I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat.
Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else.
You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.)
The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.
“Any agent on any VPS/VM” is an agent with self hosted infra. Lovable is an agent with managed infra. I think having managed infra is neat.
Secondly, a lot of the apps built on lovable are for internal purposes and not necessarily used publicly.
Honestly I could go on and on with various points to refute your dumb comment.
Is lovable worth 13B? Probably not, but I completely get why people think it is. It serves a market of non technical people that want to build apps and websites without having to use something horrible like Wordpress.
Adoption of AI application building technologies in most enterprises is much more about governance and security than it is about any particular coding feature.
They have a different approach to lovable, replit, etc... They don't let the gpt models translate directly into program code, but into an intermediate language which is then compiled by a compiler. Generation speed is blazingly fast, and so far results look great.
I really like that I can work on an app without having to wait between my prompts and can see the results nearly instantly.
Apparently it's safer too, as code generation is deterministic. But I did not check that yet, as I only recently got access.