At the age of 26, Europe's youngest self-made billionaire has emerged.

With the popularity of AI programming tools, the valuation of Lovable, a company founded just two years ago, has soared to $6.6 billion. Its co-founders, 35-year-old Anton Osika and 26-year-old Fabian Hedin, have also joined the ranks of billionaires.

In a new round of financing, Lovable, a hot "vibe coding" startup, saw its valuation jump to $6.6 billion, tripling in less than six months. As a result, the two co-founders of the company have become billionaires.

The Stockholm-based company announced two weeks ago that it had completed a new round of financing worth $330 million. This round of financing was led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, with participation from multiple institutions such as Khosla Ventures, Accel, and EQT. This round of financing has brought the total financing of this startup to $550 million.

According to Forbes' estimate, 35-year-old Anton Osika and 26-year-old Fabian Hedin each hold approximately 24% of the company's shares, and their net worths both reach $1.6 billion. At 26, Hedin has thus become one of the youngest self-made billionaires in Europe, only one month later than another Swedish AI researcher, Arvid Lunnemark, the co-founder of the AI programming tool Cursor, who joined the billionaire ranks at the age of 26 in November this year. Currently, Hedin is among the world's 13 self-made billionaires under 30.

Both founders plan that no matter how they exit the company in the future, they will donate 50% of the proceeds to charity.

"Fabian and I have made a commitment to use a significant portion of the wealth we've created through Lovable to ensure a smooth transition for humanity to superintelligent AI and make this technology beneficial to everyone in this era," Osika said in an interview with Forbes in July this year.

The AI programming tool launched by Lovable allows users to build websites and applications with just text instructions. In 2023, an AI programming tool developed by Osika in his spare time suddenly made it onto the popular list of the developer platform GitHub overnight. After seeing the tool's rapid success, Osika invited his former colleague Hedin to serve as co-founder and chief technology officer. In October of the same year, they received $8 million in seed funding from the venture capital fund Hummingbird. In November 2024, they officially launched this tool featuring the concept of "vibe coding." Last month, Osika revealed that the company's number of active users had reached 8 million, more than three times the 2.3 million users in July this year. At that time, the company told Forbes that its subscription revenue was about $1 million per day.

In July this year, Lovable achieved an annualized subscription revenue of $100 million just eight months after its launch. This speed outpaced the cloud security startup Wiz and the human resources platform Deel, which took 18 months and nearly two years respectively to reach an annualized revenue of $100 million. Lovable's direct competitor, Replit, achieved an annualized revenue of $150 million in September this year, less than a year after the launch of its AI programming tool.

AI programming tools have witnessed explosive growth this year.

In November, Cursor raised $2.3 billion in financing at a valuation of $30 billion, and all four co-founders became billionaires. In September, Cognition raised over $400 million in financing, and the company's valuation reached $10.2 billion. However, unlike AI programming startups like Cursor and Cognition that target professional programmers, Lovable is positioned to serve a larger user group of non-coders. Lovable has outperformed its direct competitors in this field, including Replit (which raised $250 million in financing at a valuation of $3 billion in September) and StackBlitz (which raised $105 million in financing in January at a valuation of about $700 million).

However, as large technology companies are entering the market one after another, the competition remains fierce. Figma and Squarespace have developed their own code-writing tools. Wix acquired the "vibe coding" startup Base44 for $80 million in June. In July, Google spent $2.4 billion to acquire the founding team of the "vibe coding" tool Windsurf (the remaining assets were later acquired by Cognition for about $250 million). OpenAI and Anthropic are also directly selling their own AI programming tools in the market.

Osika said earlier this year, "I think there's a creator inside many of us. But in the past, the ability to code or access to capital has always been the decisive threshold to enter the digital world. But now, we've entered a new era."

One of the authors of this article is a contributor to Forbes. The content of the article only represents the author's personal views.

This article is translated from:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2025/12/19/ai-startup-lovable-just-minted-one-of-europes-youngest-ever-self-made-billionaires/

This article is from the WeChat official account "Forbes" (ID: forbes_china). Authors: Alicia Park, Iain Martin. Translation: Björn & Rach. Proofreading: Lemin. Republished by 36Kr with permission.