$100M ARR in 8 Months
Who’s Anton Osika, Lovable’s founder?
Anton Osika had just woken up. He glanced at his phone and saw chaos in his notifications. He could have scrolled endlessly, the X alerts just wouldn’t stop. A pretty effective wake-up call. You know that feeling, when you’re barely awake and get hit with a jolt, the kind that makes you go “shit, what’s happening?” It wakes you right up.
The day before, Anton had posted a video on X about the project he’d been working on for a few weeks: GPT Engineer. The video showed Anton typing into the app he had just built. His prompt: build a snake game. Within seconds, the code came to life, as if by magic. I can’t say what he was expecting when he posted it, but clearly, his “plain English to working app” concept had an effect overnight. The app, open-source, had also been published on GitHub. Within a few weeks, it had hundreds of thousands of users. Anton’s inbox was overflowing. Not just with messages from developers, but also from people who had never really coded, and who had just built their first app.
It was a revolution. All that creativity locked in people’s minds by a lack of technical knowledge could finally be unleashed. The need and the product still needed refining, of course. But such enthusiasm couldn’t be ignored. For Anton, it was an opportunity he couldn’t miss.
It all started with a 6 a.m phone call.
***
Above all, Anton Osika is a scientist. He had always been passionate about technology, science, and physics. He had been coding since middle school and graduated in Engineering Physics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His first professional experiences were dedicated to research.
He embraced his first startup adventure in 2017, two years after finishing his studies, when he became the first employee and Founding Engineer at Sana Labs, a Swedish AI startup focused on learning. Three years later, he launched his own startup, Depict.ai, and took on the role of CTO. The company, which worked on product recommendations for e-commerce sites using AI, joined Y Combinator and raised $20 million from Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Tiger Global, and Northzone.
The company went through significant growth. One of the most impressive for a Swedish startup — spoiler alert, the record has since been broken. Anton faced, for the first time, the challenges of hiring, scaling, and managing rapid growth. But that first entrepreneurial experience came to an end four years later, the day Anton released GPT Engineer.
That’s when he realized there was likely something much bigger to build. Once he had found a replacement, he jumped headfirst into his new adventure.
***
Everything was moving too fast. Day after day, messages kept flooding Anton’s inbox. The number of users kept rising. GitHub stars were multiplying. He had to act quickly, seize the opportunity while it was still there.
It was six in the morning — don’t ask why so early, probably the sense of urgency — when Anton decided to call Fabian Hedin. Fabian had been part of the technical team at Depict.ai in 2022, which is how the two knew each other.
– Hi Fabian, let’s go for a walk, I have an idea.
– When?
– I’m outside.
Ten minutes later, Anton met Fabian at his doorstep. The sun was barely rising as the two set off on a long walk through the streets of Stockholm.
Two hours later, the AI startup was born.
***
The first two versions of the app were failures.
For a year, Anton, Fabian, and the small, talented team they had brought together struggled to turn their “fun tool” into a revolutionary product. Looking back, three factors held back GPT Engineer’s traction according to some early team members: first, the initial launches focused more on features than on validating a real user need. Then, the timing wasn’t ideal. The market wasn’t fully ready for a tool like this. And finally, the brand didn’t resonate. The name felt gimmicky and failed to reflect the full potential of what was under the hood.
It wasn’t until the third version, in December 2024, that product-market fit finally started to emerge. After a full rebrand — that’s when GPT Engineer became Lovable, because, at last, the tool had truly become lovable — the team learned from its mistakes and approached the launch differently: a user-centric product ; a focus on distribution, with a major Product Hunt launch and a well-crafted social media strategy (check out Anton’s LinkedIn and X profiles, they say it all) ; and a deep understanding of traction signals, like the number of mentions on social platforms, paired with a strong feedback culture.
It paid off.
Five weeks later, Lovable was generating $5.3 million in ARR. By January 2025, $10 million. By May, $50 million. And just a few weeks ago, following a record-breaking $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation, Anton proudly announced that Lovable had passed $100 million in ARR. In just eight months. Lovable became the fastest-growing startup ever, ahead of Cursor, Wiz, and even OpenAI, all of which took between one and two years to hit the $100 million mark.
Crazy.
***
A few years ago, the trend would have been to hire. Again and again. The first question people asked a startup CEO to gauge success was, “How much have you raised?” The second, “How big is your team?” Because, of course, managing a lot of people looked good. It seemed serious. But Lovable represents a new generation of startups. The kind building unicorns with as few team members as possible using AI as leverage. That’s their value proposition by the way: enabling small teams to achieve big things with AI. But it’s also what they embody. The company has just passed $100 million in ARR with only 45 employees.
Anton has a clear vision around hiring and it’s quite different from the usual narrative. You often hear people talk about experience, about bringing in seasoned specialists who’ve “been there, done that,” and can apply tried-and-tested playbooks. But Anton believes that “talent is worth ten times more than experience.” He prioritizes people who can wear multiple hats and adapt quickly.
One question that often comes up is about the company’s location: Stockholm. “Why don’t you move to the US? That’s where everything happens,” people ask. But Anton believes in Europe and its talent. He even turned down the opportunity to move to San Francisco and join Y Combinator to grow Lovable. He didn’t want to give up more equity and he feared that joining YC might distract him from building the product. He already knew the system.
Another sign of his commitment to Europe: the early funding rounds were led by European investors Hummingbird and byFounders. The latest round, however, was led by California-based Accel, a (recurring) signal of the lack of firepower in the European ecosystem when it comes to leading mega-rounds.
***
Lovable’s strength lies in having created an entirely new market. As Anton puts it, “Today, there are 47 million developers worldwide. Lovable is going to produce 1B potential builders.” Just like Canvas did brilliantly with design, the Swedish startup unlocks people’s creativity and ideas by removing technical barriers. If Lovable had focused solely on helping developers code more efficiently, its total addressable market would have remained at 47 million people. But by enabling any entrepreneur to build a product, the market becomes twenty times larger.
Anton makes this vision clear in the way he communicates. He regularly showcases Lovable users who built online businesses in just a few days and started generating thousands in MRR within weeks.
A new era is unfolding. Pretty exciting, isn’t it?
Credit to my main sources:
Behind every founder is a collection of defining moments and hard-earned lessons. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape them into stories people remember, share, and trust. Let’s talk.
Thomas