July 17, 2025

Lovable: a photo journey of day 0 to year 2

Bikes, buns, whiteboards, and one historic Series A — a look back at the ride so far.

Magnus Hambleton
Investor
Sara Rywe
Partner
Lovable: a photo journey of day 0 to year 2

Anton and Fabian have just closed a Series A led by Accel. I believe it’s one the biggest ones ever in Europe. We are very happy to be tripling down on our commitment to Lovable, maintaining our position as one of the company’s largest shareholders. This round, we are investing alongside Hummingbird (who led the pre-seed with us), Creandum (who led the Seed at the start of 2025), Visionaries Club, Evantic, 20VC and a host of very impressive angels.

We have loved Lovable from Day -1. Back when it was actually called something else.

Anton built gpt-engineer as a side project over a weekend when he was still working with Depict in the summer of 2023. The repository was one of the first explorations of what the LLMs of the day could do autonomously when given access to a terminal and ability to write and ship code to make small apps. In many ways it was the precursor (pun intended) to Claude Code. The repo went viral and got to almost 40k stars within a few weeks. I remember lots of viral twitter threads raving about how the era of AI Agents had begun. A pretty good result for a weekend project!

However, while gpt-engineer was a very cool proof of concept and could one-shot simple apps such as naughts and crosses or a game of snake, it was clear that LLMs in mid-2023 were not good enough for this to be a standalone product. Yet.

Using gpt-engineer as a basis, Anton co-founded Lovable in late summer 2023 together with the best engineer he knew, Fabian. They set the vision together for building “the last piece of code”. This is probably the best and most utopian tagline I have ever seen a company have and it remains the company mission today.

At the time, the only comparable piece of software in existence was Vercel’s v0 which was then only doing small AI generated frontend components. There were some dev-focused tooling such as Replit’s Ghostwriter and Github Copilot, but nothing for non-developers to use AI to create products. It’s hard to remember that just 20 months ago, the vision Fabian and Anton had was very revolutionary and contrarian. The world of AI changes fast.

We knew Anton via personal connections and got to know him better when he participated on our byFounders Voyage in 2023:

(also featuring Ash, founder of yes.inc — thank you for the pic!)

We partnered up officially in 2023. We offered Fabian and Anton for byFounders to invest together with Hummingbird in their pre-seed round, and we were very excited when they said yes! Here we are celebrating signing the term sheet:

Anton, Fabian and one of their first hires, Mårten, worked from our (badly lit) office for the first ~4 months until they got their own place. I remember Fabian was biking ~10km back and forth to our office every day in the middle of Swedish winter. He also had his bike stolen outside the office one day :(

Sara delivered some cinnamon buns on this particular day:

Next summer, 2024, at our byFounders Summit for portfolio founders, Anton built a Lovable app that gave the participants recommendations for who else at the Summit they should meet. I think the app took ~15min to build right before Anton’s session which is a good illustration of how far the product had come by then. Martin and I also spent the dinner that day doing a whiteboard session with Anton on the paper tablecloth — the output is a bit hard to read, but some ideas were clearly enthusiastically had.

Shortly after the summit, the pre-seed round was announced (~1 year after the investment!) and we wrote our thoughts down about why we were excited about Lovable.

Then at Slush 2024 at the end of November, Anton launched Lovable out of closed beta on stage, and hosted a spontaneous 11 minute hackathon afterwards.

Hackathon participants had 11 minutes to build an Airbnb app for renting Saunas. Some of the best ones were a Slush themed booking experience and one that used a Supabase backend to allow pre-setting the sauna’s temperature and humidity ahead of time and add a bunch of optional extras. I remember sitting near the front and frantically whatsapping with Fabian (who was with the engineering team in Stockholm) to open up permissions for the submission form during Anton’s presentation, so that participants would be able to access it when the 11 minutes started.

Number go up

I think we all know what happened after that launch on November 21, 2024. Lovable hit $1M ARR in 8 days, $10M after 2 months, $60M in 6 months and the most recent public figures are at $75M ARR after just 7 months. This pace of growth has been enough to generate a lot of headlines on its own, but it’s extra crazy considering how small the team delivering on this is: Lovable started 2025 with roughly 10 people and are now as of July 2025 at ~45 FTEs. This team works harder than any team I have come across and they are just as dedicated to their mission as the founders are (in fact a large fraction of the team are ex-founders themselves!)

The Swedish prime minister (in the middle) has mentioned Lovable alongside Spotify in speeches:

Selfishly, we love that both Fabian and Anton wear our swag on stage sometimes <3

In March, our incredible colleague Matias went above and beyond in supporting Lovable by joining the team as a full time employee. We were very sad to lose him, but it was for a great cause!

Lovable is, as of writing, at more than 2 million monthly active users, with tens of millions of projects built in Lovable. The team, which has one of the highest talent densities in the world, is shipping features faster than ever and has launched collaboration, custom domains and most recently “agent mode” which is a complete step change in how easy it is to build advanced products. Thousands of enterprises use Lovable for prototyping and internal tooling. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs are building their companies on Lovable and hundreds of thousands more individuals are building games, personal tooling and creative projects using Lovable.

Nobody at Lovable takes the success they have had so for granted, nor do they believe they are anywhere close to being done. The journey ahead is long and the mission remains the same: to build the last piece of software. We look forward to walking alongside the Lovable team on that journey.

🖤

Magnus, Sara & the full byFounders team

More about the author(s)
Magnus Hambleton
Investor

Magnus is on the investment team.

Sara Rywe
Partner

Sara is a Partner at byFounders.

More about the author(s)
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