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Lovable exec says ‘big boys and girls’ like OpenAI and Anthropic worry her more than other vibe coding startups

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Other vibe coding players are not the biggest competition, says one Lovable exec.

“I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world,” Lovable’s head of growth Elena Verna said on a Sunday episode of the “20VC” podcast. “So, OpenAIs, Anthropics, Googles, Apples, more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from sideways.”

This is because the distribution power of these tech giants and frontier labs in the market is unparalleled, she said.

Stockholm-based Lovable was valued at $6.6 billion in a December funding round led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures. It competes with other vibe coding startups like Cursor, Replit, and Emergent, as well as far bigger and better-funded players, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, that make their own AI coding tools.

Verna, who joined the startup last May after a series of advisory and head of growth stints at various startups, said that in a world where products are becoming increasingly similar, distribution and growth are winning strategies.

“Whoever has the best distribution that is earned, that is competitively defensible, that is sustainable, that is predictable, is going to be the winner in the market,” she said. “I worry about the companies that have that figured out.”

Verna’s comments about competition follow a period of brutal comparisons between products made by vibe coding startups and Anthropic’s Claude Code.

After Anthropic released its latest model, Opus 4.6, founders and developers said on X that they are ditching their expensive Cursor and Lovable subscriptions for Claude Code.

Still, Lovable is going strong.

The Swedish startup’s annual recurring revenue has surged by more than 30%, from $300 million to $400 million in a single month, Business Insider reported. ARR, a key metric to gauge startup performance, refers to the predictable revenue a company expects to generate over a year.

Lovable’s chief revenue officer, Ryan Meadows, told Business Insider that the company plans to more than double its head count by the end of 2026, from 146 to 350 employees.

He added that Lovable, which specializes in making coding user-friendly, sees at least 200,000 new vibe coding projects created each day.




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Ben Bergman

AI vibe coding darling Lovable is racing toward $1 billion in revenue

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Lovable, a Swedish vibe coding startup valued at $6.6 billion, saw its torrid growth accelerate even as Anthropic’s Claude Code went viral over the past few months.

The Swedish startup says its annual recurring revenue has surged by more than 30%, from $300 million to $400 million in a single month, and could top $1 billion by year’s end, Lovable’s chief revenue officer, Ryan Meadows, told Business Insider in an exclusive interview. ARR refers to the predictable revenue a company expects to generate over a year from subscriptions or recurring contracts.

Lovable’s breakout growth comes amid a broader boom in AI-powered coding tools, which include Claude Code and startup Cursor, which was last valued at nearly $30 billion. In late 2025, Cursor said it had $1 billion in annualized revenue.

Lovable launched at the end of 2024 and reached $100 million in ARR just eight months later, doubling to $200 million by the end of 2025.

Vibe coding allows novices with limited programming expertise to create code using AI. Lovable, founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, aims to make coding even more user-friendly, enabling non-engineers to make software and applications. It was valued at $6.6 billion in a December funding round led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology fund.

“It’s accelerating quite a bit,” Meadows said. “We’ve doubled the number of active users daily just in the last couple of months.” Lovable now boasts over 15 million daily active users and sees 200,000 new vibe coding projects created each day, according to Meadows.

The vast majority of Lovable users are still non-technical founders and entrepreneurs, but Meadows says the company is seeing its fastest growth from the enterprise business it launched in August.

Anthropic is a partner rather than a competitor

Lovable’s most recent growth spurt occurred after the release of Claude Code. But rather than eating into Lovable’s market share, Meadows says most customers use both tools. Professional software developers and engineering teams use Claude, while non-technical staffers prefer Lovable.

“It’s a rising tide,” he said. “We’ve been super happy with what we’re seeing.”

Lovable is powered by Claude, and when Anthropic launched its marketplace this week, it prominently featured Lovable.

“They’re pretty committed to working with us to pass business through,” said Meadows. “We’re going to keep investing in that partnership.”

A hiring spree

Lovable has rocketed to $400 million in ARR with a lean staff of just 146 employees, said Meadows. This year, the company will embark on a hiring spree, mostly in product and engineering roles, and will end the year with around 350 employees, he added.

Though its engineering team will continue to be based in Stockholm, the company will be opening its first US office this year in Boston to house go-to-market roles.

“We can’t hire fast enough,” Meadows said.

Have a tip? Contact Ben Bergman via email at bbergman@businessinsider.com or Signal at BenBergman.11




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