Lovable: The AI startup helping you build Full-Stack Web Apps in seconds

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup uses AI to build full-stack web apps for you in seconds

• Since their public launch 2 weeks ago, they’ve grown to over 3,000 paying customers and $1M ARR

• They’ve raised a $7.5 Million pre-seed round led by Hummingbird and ByFounders

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Lovable 📈

Lovable was founded in November 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin with the mission to allow anyone to create software. 🧑‍💻

Lovable builds full-stack web apps for you with natural language - so imagine ChatGPT but for building an entire app… 🤯

Product teams use Lovable right now to more clearly conceptualize new ideas and validate them with users. 💨This way founders and solopreneurs can iterate towards Product-Market Fit (PMF) 10x faster.

With Lovable, Software Engineers and Designers can build entire front ends and applications in minutes. Here’s a little about what it exactly does:

• Has a beautiful, easy-to-navigate UI 🖼️

• Can quickly iterate and edit code from natural language inputs 💨

• AI-powered debugging 👾

• Can add things like user authentication, storing data, call external APIs, add Stripe for payments, Twilio for sending out emails 💳

Lovable can even help you build AI applications by calling OpenAI’s APIs into the app you built.

Less than 1% of the human population can code, but we’re now entering a new era where anyone is going to be able to build much faster without writing a single line of code.

Lovable has found a way to identify all the places where AI gets stuck building software and painstakingly teach the AI how to get around these bottlenecks. 🤖

For most people this is 95% of the value you get from building software… 🧑‍💻

Backstory 👀

Anton Osika grew up in Sweden and always had a lot of initiative taking and excitement for building cool tech. He wanted to have a lot of positive impact on the world since he was a teen.

At the age of 12, he started coding and super early on he knew that being an entrepreneur was arguably the most effective way to have an impact on the world. 🌎

This really struck him while at University - when he joined CERN, the place where they discovered a big particle accelerator. 🔭CERN had a lot of cool, super smart people but what Anton observed was that they were working extremely hard on extremely inelastic problems.

This meant they weren’t making much progress even though they were really smart people.🤓Anton then figured out that in the industry, there was much bigger room and higher elasticity for doing something useful that makes a significant difference. 💫

Fabian was similar in this way, having built ventures since age 10 and selling a prop-tech startup in high school. 🧒He also went on to develop Stephen Hawking’s computer interface and worked with ex-SpaceX engineers on wheelchair technology. 🌠

Anton then went on to finish his Masters in Engineering Physics and Applied Mathematics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

He was then the first technical hire at a prop-tech firm helping them generate > 80% yearly returns and consistent <5% drawdown. 📈

He was then also the first hire at Sana Labs where Anton developed award-winning AI algorithms and helped serve hundreds of thousands of users. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Anton then went on to start his entrepreneurial journey with Depict.ai - a startup developing cutting edge ML for e-commerce stores. He applied to YC with this idea and got in for the 2020 Summer batch…☀️

Depict.ai went on to do pretty well and gained a ton of attention. They raised over $20M from investors like Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures and NorthZone, and was 2x Top Y Combinator startup. 🏆

Timeline & Stats 📊

At Depict, the team liked having philosophical dinner discussions about how different things are going to impact the way we live and work. 🤔

At one dinner, Anton proposed that:very rapidly, LLMs are going to be composed into systems that can replace most work done in software engineering. 💻

To prove this point, he built his own tool - “GPT engineer” which acted as an AI software engineer. This turned out to be super useful for anyone building anything online.

In a couple of weeks, he launched a beta. Users loved the product so much that they got hooked and converted into paying customers. 💸

💰By October, Lovable raised a $7.5M seed round led by Hummingbird and ByFounders with participation from DeepMind Angel Operators, Shopify’s Siavash Ghorbani, Voi’s Frederik Hjelm, Creandum co-founder Stefan Lindberg and more.

Over the next 2 months, GPT Engineer blew up everywhere, getting over 27k people on their waitlist and over 52,000 Stars on Github. 🌟It also reached the front page of both Product Hunt and Hacker News… 🗞️

More than 1000 products were built on Lovable every day. 🚀

The product was clearly exploding, so Anton decided to launch it publicly on the 21st of November 2024 (2 weeks ago). 

In just 2 weeks, Lovable has already reached over $1M in ARR with over 3000 paying customers. 📈

Lovable plans to grow a lot bigger with Anton jokingly posting that “ if the exponential trend continues we will have 400 million customers by 1st april 2025 🙂🤨”

Here’s some advice from him that he posted on Twitter/X:

Nice and Simple.

Before you go 👋

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Thank you for reading.

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