What's so special about Lovable?

0:04Hello and welcome to the Sifted podcast, the show where we help you get to know the brightest and boldest people and companies in Europe's startup ecosystem. As always, I'm Amy, Sifted's editor and your host. But today, in a break from tradition, I'm joined not by a founder or investor, but by my colleague Mimi Binning, Sifted's Europe editor, to take a good look at one of Europe's hottest startups and one that she's been doing a lot of reporting on. That company is AI startup Lovable, which has made headlines this year for reaching$50 million in annual recurring revenue just a year after launch and has proven very popular with people like me who can't code wanting to spin up websites and apps very quickly.

0:43The founder Anton Ossica recently had lunch with Mimi so there's no one better to tell us more about the company, why everyone is quite so excited about it and what might be in store for it in the next few years. Mimi hello welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much Amy it's great to be on it. So lovable Stockholm based AI company you are also in Stockholm. What does it actually do? Well, Lovable is an AI agent that makes you as a customer create websites without doing any kind of coding. So you can do it in minutes. And it made loads of headlines for being the fastest growing startup in Europe, hitting 50 million in annual recurring revenue within just a year or so of launching.

1:31It raised 15 million pre-series A led by Creandum and a whole bunch of other kind of sexy angel investors. Why was this such a hot deal? Why did all the investors want in? Yeah, I mean, who knows, right? But I suppose that the investors are really keen on this company, both because the co-founder, Anton Ossica, has a great past of actually helping build great AI startups but also because that you know if you're gonna bet on something right now as an investor you want to bet on something that's actually going to grow and it's in this kind of area of agents that's actually people really want to pick up and i think we all know this but ai agent startups are just super buzzy at the moment sifted data team tracked 65 european ai agent companies that raised money in the first quarter of this year.

2:24One of the really big ones is Eleven Labs, the kind of conversational AI agent that turns stuff we write into audio, but then there's a whole host of legal tech AI agents that have been raising money. And then obviously companies like Lovable that are helping you build stuff and removing the need to know how to code when you want to create things with AI. All investors love AI agents, right? and it takes less money, less power. It's much easier to maybe create a company like Lovable than, for example, the French large language model company Mistral. So I think it's like Lovable is an easy bet for investors in some way because, I mean, with that kind of growth, it's easy for them to see that this could be a success that they could actually get a lot of money back on.

3:10And do we know who their customers are and what's their business model? How are they making all this revenue? yeah so this is a subscription model so you pay around 20 an hour depending on how much support and how big your team is well then you can also have a freemium model i believe so i've even seen like kids emailing and so nasica and he's like sharing that on linkedin asking for more money put into their account so they can like code more and obviously this is a great way of sharing like how great they are because everyone wants to to be on lovable so they have like kids using it obviously and they have like startup founders i know they've been building their kind of first website using lovable they have like normal people just want to try it out and build their kind of their own websites so i think it's like it's worked a lot both with like people who want to become startup founders want to have their own business to build their website and also just like you know everyone who wants to try out to do something without being able to code i do think however though maybe that people who can code a bit may get a better result because they're probably better at prompting you mentioned linkedin there and how the founder anton is using linkedin i've got it up right now i'm scrolling the guy is posting at least maybe once or twice a day loads of feedback from customers people just saying i absolutely love this i'm trying to build an app to help the UK health tech sector.

4:38There's a bunch of videos of kids just coding on Lovable. So this guy is like a marketing mastermind. Does he come across that way when you meet him in the flesh? No, it's my quick answer to that. But no, he doesn't. And I'm wondering because it wasn't that long ago he actually announced that he hired a marketing person from 20VC. So 20VC, as most of us know, is kind of really hyped venture capitalist. One of their partners actually joined Lovable as their head of marketing, which I find really exciting because that means that actually says something about the company, how hot it is, right? Anyway, so Anton, he's using LinkedIn a lot, but it was like another French investor added just a few days ago that Lavable is actually using 12 platforms all the social media channels but also lots of other ones like GitHub, Product Hunt etc to sell and to gain more people to join them.

5:39So they obviously have a really good sales strategy about going out everywhere and it doesn't cost them that much I think either. And I've just reached the post where Anton has shared a picture, this is a month ago of the, I don't actually know if this is real or not, but the NASDAQ billboard in, I think it's New York, with a lovable logo on it saying, you don't need a CTO. So they've got this kind of slogan, haven't they, around, you know, our app is so good that you can build stuff without a tech team. Is it really that good? What are its limitations at the moment? Yeah, I mean, I have a friend who's just been building something on it who wasn't that pleased Maybe it's because he's a normal kind of 20-something.

6:26But also because maybe you have higher expectations of what you can build. Maybe you have something in the mind and you want exactly that. And then it's quite hard to prompt an AI to do that. I think there's lots of things that you obviously can do, which has been shown by so many of its thousands and thousands of users. So you can go in and you can prompt it to create a website for you. For example, if you want to start selling, I don't know, longevity supplements, you can quite easily do that in a few clicks. Then if you want to create like a game or do something different, which is a little bit more kind of hardcore, you might actually run into some troubles because maybe the simpler things is easier to do and lovable.

7:10than if you want to do a bit more difficult, kind of more harder kind of development. And like, if you have features that you really want to be in a certain way, maybe you will be, I don't know, disappointed. But I think as a company, they are evolving all the time and they are trying to at least fix all these kind of bugs and so on. But they still have some like early day problems, but people seem to love it. So if you want to build an easy website, that's what you can do with it. And it's interesting, it's still a really tiny team, isn't it? Is it about 30 people? Is that right? Yeah. So it's not that many at all.

7:48And I think Anton Ossica used to work for this other AI startup, Depict AI, before, who was a co-founder of that. And also he was the first employee at SANA Labs, which is another AI startup in Sweden and it's been around for about nine years. So he's been building up engineering teams, both at SANA Labs and Depict AI. So he has this kind of experience, but he's only in his early 30s, but already the experience of building these kind of engineering teams. So I think he's both quite selective, but also that he realizes he doesn't need that many people because he gets them to work much longer hours instead.

8:26But it's funny because in Sweden, we have a really good work-life balance. But for these kind of new AI startups, they are like completely saying that no way, we need to work like 60 hours a week and we need to work all the time, which is kind of going with the kind of Swedish culture. But in another way, it seems to really work for them. And they seem to be able to attract really great talent because they're saying like, well, we're doing it differently. We are running this company, a European company, but we're like, we want to take over the world. in that way what's what's Anton like I think it's funny because he's well Anton is one of these guys who is really good on like LinkedIn when also I went back for like a year where I bit over a year ago and I was reading his emails and then in those emails it's also he's very kind of not shy in any way and he's like saying we haven't had this success and like after I did this AI tool for depict I was seen as some kind of a hero I mean so he had this kind of language which is quite I don't know bullish in some way but when I actually met him in person he's like just a nice guy you know not very pushy but also kind of reflective of what he has done and what he could have done wrong what did you do right like he was mentioning when working for this former startup of his depict AI, that he felt guilty about leaving the company in a way or at a time when the company might not have been completely at the best stage it could have been.

10:03So he has those thoughts. So I think he's kind of a nice guy. That's my feeling. What's next for Lovable? Well, there were rumors that Lovable would open an office in the US and move over there. but when I was speaking to Osaka he was mentioning no we will the core will stay in Europe but they're going to open an office quite soon in the US because they have so much customers there and they probably want to be able to sell to US customers more and need to have a team there and they're going to raise more funding there's been so much snooping around from like Andreas and Horowitz and others I would doubt that it would take long for them to raise another round because they only raised like they had a 15 million Series A just a while ago back in april i think and as people in the kind of ecosystem said like that was the worst kept secret ever obviously for media so it'd be interesting to see what happens to the next round if that will be a well kept secret as well what do you think about the competition do you think lovable has what it takes or i guess my question with so many of these ai applications is how sticky are they?

11:16How will they prevent consumers just trying a pretty similar one that is slightly better or becomes slightly cheaper? Where's the loyalty? Where, as the VCs would say, where's the moat? Yeah, it seems like right now in a way, so they have, I mean, the loyalty and the brand and everything around it seems to be like people seem to love it, which is much of the name lovable. but they do seem to have something there actually i think they're lucky to have anton oscar i think he seems to be kind of a really good leader and attract really great people and i think that's kind of the key for being a successful company in this space because if you can bring in all the best engineers then you're probably able to build on top of the things you already started and maybe keep your competitive edge i would say and now for just a few quick non-lovable questions which are some other companies on your radar Mimi who have you got your eye on I'm actually also looking into the AI agent data button based in Norway sounds really exciting and does something similar to lovable and as always Daniel X the Spotify founders preventative health startup Neko Health is always on my radar too and longevity is something you are perpetually obsessed with Mimi what's the next big story you're working on in longevity Ah, yes.

12:40We have an event in Stockholm coming up soon where the longevity maestro Brian Johnson from the US will come and visit and actually hold much of this conference. And that's going to be very exciting. So that is one of the things I really want to dig into as well. Like, it's Stockholm, the next haven for longevity startups. Amazing. And finally, if listeners want to follow all the fantastic reporting you're doing, Rumi, where can they find you? They can find me at sifted.eu, but they can also find me on LinkedIn under Mimibilling in one word. Amazing. That is all we have time for now. Please let us know what you thought of this experimental new episode.

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