Svante Gullichsen via Lovable
- Lovable CEO Anton Osika said vibe-coding helps creatives without technical skills test their ideas.
- He told Business Insider that “super creative brains are our most dedicated users.”
- Lovable reached $100 million in annualized revenue in July, eight months after hitting $1 million.
Silicon Valley is in the midst of a coding renaissance, according to Lovable CEO Anton Osika.
While coding was once the domain of computer science whizzes and workers with serious technical chops, the advent of vibe-coding has made space for workers with no engineering expertise to unleash their creativity.
“That characteristic — these super creative brains — are our most dedicated users,” he said.
Vibe-coding, also known as AI-assisted coding, is the latest obsession among both tech giants and startups. The concept is simple: developers use natural language to instruct AI tools to generate code. Over the past several months, AI coding platforms have attracted millions of users and generated billions of dollars in revenue.
Lovable, which launched in 2023, reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue in July, just eight months after earning its first million dollars in revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing startups in history.
The Swedish startup is now valued at $1.8 billion and has raised a total of over $222 million, according to PitchBook. It joins the ranks of other major players in the vibe-coding space, including Replit, Vercel, and Anysphere, which all have multibillion-dollar valuations.
Osika told Business Insider that its biggest clients are not individuals but companies, including fellow Swedish unicorn Klarna, and some tech giants.
He said that vibe-coding companies succeed by helping non-technical people turn their ideas into reality — a gap that has long been unmet in the tech industry. Osika previously told Business Insider that computer science degrees are no longer the “entry ticket” to tech, and the leaders of the vibe-coding movement aren’t the most technical.
He elaborated in a more recent interview, telling Business Insider that the best users tend to be on the creative side.
“If you take most companies, you have these super creative people that have a ton of good ideas — and they can just, like, throw them out,” he said.
He said vibe-coding allows them to materialize their ideas and say to their colleagues, “Here’s something that we can change in how we run the business, with software, with AI.”
Tech workers and executives have told Business Insider that vibe-coding is best for building proof of concepts and validating existing code. However, like so many AI-based solutions, it’s imperfect. It’s still prone to mistakes, often writes unnecessarily long code, or generates code that lacks the proper architecture.
Osika disputed recent data from Google Trends, analyzed by Barclays, that suggests the Lovable app has seen a recent 40% dip in traffic, which the bank’s analysts said could be due to a temporary summer slump or evidence that users just aren’t feeling the vibes.
Lovable did not share its exact user numbers with Business Insider. Osika, however, said that the platform sees 100,000 new projects created daily and that usage is on the rise.
“That’s actually not at all what our user data shows,” he said, referring to the Barclays report. “Usage has only grown, and the users are getting a lot of real value. This isn’t about trends. This is about a new way of building software, and it’s literally just getting started.”
Last week, Lovable announced two upgrades to its platform, including Lovable AI, which lets anyone create AI-powered software with just a few prompts, and Lovable Cloud, which helps eliminate infrastructure complexity on the backend. Users can engage with both through a conversational interface.
These upgrades eliminate the need for technical skills altogether, Osika said.
“The update makes it so that anyone can go from an idea to a running project. You can say, ‘build me an AI research assistant for journalists,’ and then you get everything working in seconds — data storage, AI logic, everything included. No infrastructure setup, it just works,” he said.
Osika believes the popularity of vibe-coding heralds a new era for software development.
“This is, of course, a productivity boost, but I think it’s much more than that,” he said. “I think this is the beginning of a new software economy.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
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