$1.8 billion: Swedish AI unicorn makes OpenAI and Meta nervous.

During the Internet era, European technology companies usually had to withstand tremendous pressure to stage a comeback. For example, the Swedish music streaming company Spotify grew up with great difficulty between Apple, YouTube, and Amazon, while Skype was acquired by Microsoft. Now, in the era of artificial intelligence, how will the situations of these European companies change? Lovable might become a valuable case for observation. An important point is that the founders of this generation of young European technology companies seem to be better at "dealing with" American tech giants than their predecessors.

Anton Osika, the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, has just completed the largest Series A financing in Swedish history for this "vibe coding" startup. The company's current valuation is $1.8 billion. Image source: Svante Gullichsen Photography

Original title: "AI 'Vibe Coding' Company Lovable Becomes Sweden's Latest Unicorn"

Anton Osika, the founder and CEO of Lovable, often jokes that starting this "vibe coding" (vibe coding means developers use natural language prompts to instruct AI tools to generate, optimize, and debug code) startup in Europe is like playing a game on "hard mode." However, this hasn't stopped him from achieving some initial results.

This AI startup, which has been established for only two years, has just completed a $200 million financing round, with a valuation of $1.8 billion. This is also the largest Series A financing in Swedish history.

This makes Lovable, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden's latest unicorn company, joining the ranks of fintech company Klarna, music streaming giant Spotify, and King, the developer of "Candy Crush."

Recently, Google poached the core executives of Windsurf in a $2.4 billion deal, scuttling OpenAI's acquisition of this programming startup, while the remaining part of the company was acquired by its competitor Cognition. Since then, investors' interest in AI programming startups has become even stronger, and this deal was reached against this backdrop.

Lovable and its American competitors, Replit and StackBlitz, have all achieved significant growth in the past year. Their strategy is to target users without programming skills - the potential scale of this group far exceeds that of traditional programmers. The "AI builders" tools of these companies can transform simple text instructions into websites and applications within minutes, leveraging the coding and reasoning capabilities of large language models. "Our mission is to enable anyone to participate in the construction of digital products," Anton Osika, the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, told Forbes.

This has caught the attention of well - known design tool competitors such as Figma and Squarespace, which have developed their own code - writing tools. Wix, a NASDAQ - listed company, spent $80 million in June to acquire startup Base44.

Now, Osika also has the support of some deep - pocketed investors, including Accel, which led this round of financing, and early supporters such as 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird, and Visionaries Club - they also participated in this round of financing.

"Lovable targets ordinary people, who account for 99% of the population and have never had the ability to build digital products in the past," said Ben Fletcher, a partner at Accel. In June, Accel also participated in a $900 million financing round for Cursor, a developer programming tool headquartered in San Francisco.

Osika said that Lovable will use the $200 million investment to expand its current team of 45 people and further improve its products to support users in developing more complex applications and websites. This startup is also actively expanding its cooperation with internal teams of large companies and has currently reached deals with Klarna, Hubspot (a competitor of Salesforce), and French photo - editing startup Photoroom.

Compared with novice programmers, these enterprises may have stricter security standards. News media Semafor reported earlier this year that there were security vulnerabilities in the applications created by Lovable's AI, leading to the exposure of user data. Lovable denied that its AI was responsible for the data breach but has since strengthened security checks. "In the past few months, we have introduced several improvement measures to ensure that the system can identify and check potential security risks," Osika said. "The level of security we need to achieve is that as long as users don't act willfully and completely ignore Lovable's prompts, they won't be able to create anything insecure."

Lovable had only raised $22.5 million before, and this round of financing has enabled this two - year - old company to surpass its major American competitors in terms of financing. Replit raised $97 million in 2023; StackBlitz, which operates the programming tool Bolt, was reported to have negotiated an $80 million financing round in January this year, with a valuation of $700 million at that time. Bloomberg previously reported that Osika negotiated with investors in June.

Lovable is now the largest among a group of AI startups emerging in Stockholm.

Forbes reported in May that legal AI startup Legora raised $80 million; AI agency Sana completed a $55 million financing round in October 2024. Lovable also has the support of Flat Capital, the venture fund of Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the co - founder of Klarna. Other European tech billionaires, such as Nik Storonsky of Revolut, Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of Supercell, and Olivier Pomel of Datadog, also participated in this round of financing.

Osika said that Lovable's rapid growth is mainly due to the abundant talent cultivated by Sweden's early unicorn companies and the new AI - focused startups. He himself has previously worked at Sana and another AI company headquartered in Stockholm.

Although Sweden's technology industry is constantly developing, Europe has fallen behind the United States and China in building large language models, and San Francisco has once again become a gathering place for startups. However, Osika believes that being based locally might give him an advantage. "Overall, Europeans are far less ambitious than Americans. But if we can ignite this drive, we can unleash more raw power and build an epoch - making company," Osika said.

This article is translated from:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2025/07/17/ai-vibe-coder-lovable-is-swedens-latest-unicorn/

This article is from the WeChat official account "Forbes." Author: Iain Martin. Translator: Lemin. Republished by 36Kr with permission.