Quantum Leap Lovable $6.6B/$330M

0:00My personal favorite vibe coding startup lovable has raised$330 million at a$6.6.6 billion valuation. This is absolutely massive for a company that is like almost a year old. They have had an absolutely incredible run up. And I understand why they've been able to raise this money as someone who is a really loyal user and has been super impressed with their product. I'll give you a little bit of a perspective of where I think this is going in the future, how they're able to grow so fast, why they've been able to raise so much money and what the future of lovable is with this new$330 million. Before we get into that, I would love for you to try my new AI app and tool builder called AI Box.

0:42You can go check it out on AIbox.ai. You can create any sort of tool or workflow. It will automatically link together multiple AI models will fill out a prompt with AI for you and have it automate different processes and workflows that you might do and create full tools. There's lots of exciting things that we'll be doing with it in the future. And in addition, we have a playground where you can try over 40 of the top models all for 20 bucks a month. You can build tools, try models, go check out AIbox.ai. All right, let's get into what's going on with Lovable. So this is a Swedish startup. They have more than tripled their valuation in just five months, which I think really shows how much their investors are excited for this company.

1:23It's based out of Stockholm, and they've just raised their Series B, which is 330 million dollars. It was led by Capital G and Menlo Ventures, and like I mentioned, it has a $6.6 billion valuation. Coastal Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, all of those were in on this deal. So you have all of the top tier investors. This new round is only a few months after they raised a$200 million Series A round in July that gave them a$1.8 billion valuation and now they're already at a$6.6 billion valuation. I think one of the earliest startups to really capitalize on AI Boom was Lovable. They had a platform that let you build software and complete applications using text prompts.

2:06Now, when they first started, when I first started using Lovable, it wasn't very good at building actual tools that could complete tasks. And they have come a long way. So when I was originally using it, I mean, I've spent, you know,$1 ,000 a month on Lovable in the past, depending on projects that I'm working on. If you go to AIbox.ai, that entire homepage was created using Lovable. I'm not a developer. And instead of using a designer, I'm able to get basically chat with lovable and have it create a design that I love that looks exactly like what I want it to do. And so as far as the front end UI and stuff, I would I'll usually go and get lovable to create a design for me.

2:44And I give that to my developers who are working on the back end. And I can give them the code so they instantly can integrate in the past, I used to have to do basically the same process, but I'd be talking with a designer on a call, or they would get something done and get it back to me. And I'd have to make iterations and tell them to make updates and changes. And once the design was done with the designer on figla, we'd hand that off to the front end developers and they would spend time trying to get that to actually look good with code. And so it was quite a process with lovable. I talked a level of what about what I want it to do.

3:14I give it, you know, I in natural language chat with it about the updates and the style designs and the things that I want. And then it creates it has the code. One thing that we've done that has made this like super, super easy is my our development team will give me like the libraries that we use and the you know the types of code that you know that are allowed I will just tell lovable like only use these packages don't add any new packages only use these libraries and it will do the whole thing with kind of the the limitations you give it it will design all of that and then when you have to put the code into your code base it's super easy it's not adding new packages this is a problem I think the first time I used Lovable, I had tried to give it to my CTO and he was like, dude, this has like 30 new packages that are not currently used just for your one page.

4:03So we had to work on it a bit. Once you get over that and you figure out how to work with it, it is super fast, super easy, and really, really beautiful. A lot of major companies use Lovable, including Klarna, Zendesk, Uber, and they love it. And for the same reason that I've mentioned here, apparently Lovable has more than 100 ,000 new projects created on its platform every day. They have 25 million projects built during their first year. And they're planning to use this new capital, this$330 million as they've just raised to essentially deepen integrations with third party tools. And I think this is absolutely the right approach because when they first started, it was basically a beautiful front end design maker, but it wasn't something that was really good at making products.

4:47They've added a whole bunch of really great integrations, Supabase for backends and databases has been added. So you can actually create tools that you can have users that sign up and you have like a database for your tool. They've done a bunch of great integrations with AI tools so that you can have something like OpenAI running inside and you can actually create a tool that uses AI to generate things for people. So I think the third party software integrations is really the way that this can this can shine. Like, yes, the product is good just from a standpoint of like, you can make pretty designs with it, but now they're going to make this.

5:20So it's something that's really functional and useful for tools for teams to actually build tools with. They're going to expand their enterprise focused features, which I think is a great play. They're going to add some core infrastructure, like databases, payments, and hosting to support full scale application development. And honestly, I think they've already started to do this. so I think they're just kind of like telling everyone like look we're going to do more of this but this is already a big focus for them the payments is big right like if you if someone could actually go and build a website that could charge people for using the tool that you build on there all of a sudden people are able to make money from it when it comes to doing a lot of the hosting and that's a really big feature speaking on stage at the slush conference in Helsinki this year their CEO Anton was talking about this and he said that the company was growing super fast and part of this was because of his decision to keep the business headquartered in Sweden even though everyone told him to move to Silicon Valley he said it was tempting but I really resisted that I can sit here now and say look you can build a global AI company from this country there's more available talent if you have a strong mission and a lot of urgency working together so I don't know if it's only successful because it's out of Sweden I feel like it may have also been successful out of Silicon Valley but it is I think a phenomenal thing that you don't have to have every AI company in Silicon Valley.

6:40So I really do appreciate that, you know, they're a great example of that. In November, Lovable had a bunch of criticism. There's some reports that came out that said they'd not been paying value added tax, which applies to a lot of goods and services in the EU. Their CEO confirmed the issue on LinkedIn saying that they would get back to it and, you know, push back against the claims that the EU tax policy makes their region really inhospitable for high growth startups. So I mean, on the one hand, yes, they are like sort of this anomaly out of Sweden. On the other hand, he really did get kind of roasted by by some of these tax things, but he still defends the area.

7:17So good for him. Obviously, this is a really popular industry vibe coding is getting is getting more and more adoption. VCs are putting a ton of money into this cursor is another really high profile company, which is sort of in the space, but it's more for developers. They raised$3.2 billion in November at a$29 billion valuation. So just like Lovable, that made it the second funding round that Cursor did this year. And the valuation doubled between June and November. So obviously, this sector, this space for Vibe Coding, whether it's no code for non-coders or for developers, is growing incredibly fast and is, you know, printing a ton of money.

7:56And I think anytime that you let people build tools that can let them generate money, they'll spend a ton of money on it. And I think this is kind of the unlock that both Cursor and Lovable have discovered. So exciting to follow both of these companies into the future and a huge congratulations to everyone on the Lovable team. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you go and check out AIbox.ai. If you want to build tools, if you're not a developer, the link is in the description and I will catch you in the next episode.