Lovable raises $7.5M for GPT Engineer

Lovable, a platform aiming to allow anyone to create software, has closed a $7.5M pre-Seed funding round. The round was led by Hummingbird VC and byFounders VC, top Nordic funds and angel syndicates, as well as Deepmind angel operators, prominent founders of global AI companies, angel investors Mattias Miksche  and Bjarke Klinge Staun, Shopify’s Siavash Ghorbani Voi’s Fredrik Hjelm, and Creandum co-founder Stefan Lindeberg.

In parallel, the company has successfully launched its beta product, GPT Engineer, which acquired hundreds of paying users overnight, reached the front page of Product Hunt and Hacker News, and garnered 75 five-star reviews from users, with a current 5/5 rating on Product Hunt.

As a European alternative to US-based AI coding tools, Lovable's GPT Engineer stands out for its superior performance and practical applicability. The platform allows users to describe desired features for websites and web apps, with GPT Engineer’s AI generating production-ready code in real-time. Unlike other AI solutions that offer slow, unreliable coding assistants, GPT Engineer provides instant feedback and enables rapid, accurate iteration for both seasoned developers and complete beginners. Overall, GPT Engineer can go beyond building just prototypes and websites, and helps users ship fully functional web apps.

The team employs multiple customised Large Language Models with vision capabilities from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Through advanced reasoning, GPT Engineer can create, debug, and maintain application integrity autonomously. GPT Engineer's system understands user intent, recognises its own capabilities and limitations, can fix projects independently, and knows when to request user input.

Lovable was founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin. Anton, coding since age 12, co-founded the Stockholm AI community. His experience includes being Sana Labs’ first technical hire, where he developed award-winning AI algorithms, and co-founding Depict.ai, a YC startup which raised $20M from global top investors, where he served as CTO. Fabian has built ventures from age 10, selling a prop-tech startup while in high school. His experience includes developing Stephen Hawking's computer interface and working with ex-SpaceX engineers on wheelchair technology. The founders’ goal is to allow anyone to create software, addressing the critical skills gap in an industry worth $4.7 trillion and growing at 20% annually.

Anton Osika commented: "We want to expand the world's coding capabilities beyond the current 1% of the population who can program, and make software more accessible as a result. This is already happening: Simon, one of our early users, has created the first version of his SaaS startup, while another one of our users, Katrin, decided to take a sabbatical from their job to pursue new business ideas after having developed a sophisticated application.

Users love GPT Engineer because it's like having a super senior developer sharing their tricks with them. It allows them to build startups in a week, create beautiful UIs instantly, and integrate with backends very easily. Our users tell us all the time that they are amazed by how quickly they can go from idea to functional app, whether they're technical founders or those without coding experience.

This funding will help us take the company towards a future where we can take on large-scale development while our users only have to focus on being creative and enjoying themselves”.

The platform has already garnered significant interest, with over 27,000 people on the waitlist and more than 52,000 GitHub stars on the first open-source CLI (Command Line Interface) version.

Firat Ileri, Partner at Hummingbird, said: "Lovable is entering the market at a crucial time when the demand for software development far outpaces the available talent. Web apps make up 80% of the software we interact with today, yet only a small minority of people can build them. While a handful of companies focus on creating AI coding assistants for software engineers, Lovable’s GPT Engineer is the only one allowing non technical people to produce the same results. Their vision, combined with their focus on reliability and real-world impact, has the potential to trigger unprecedented levels of innovation across various industries - and for thousands of people - and we're really excited to be part of it”.

The funding will support Lovable's plans to attract the best European talent to join their existing team, made of International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalists and senior ex scaleup operators. It will also be used for compute resources, and data collection and refinement.