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Alex Johnson
Today on the podcast, I want to talk about a really interesting AI company, which is called Lovable, that has just reached unicorn status. They passed $1 billion in valuation doing something really interesting. Essentially, they help you create apps and websites with natural language. So you're talking to AI and they're able to help you actually create a tool. Now, there's some caveats, how useful this tool is, what it's actually capable of doing. I want to break that down just to go talk about a little bit about the hype versus the reality of the tool, what they're able to do, who invested. I'll go in the background and go in depth on level, because I do think this is a very interesting company that you should keep your eyes on and watch out for going into the future. Before I do, I wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your own personal business using AI tools like Lovable and so many others that I mentioned on this show, I'd love for you to try out the AI Hustle School community. Every single week. I post a video there that I don't post anywhere else, and I basically have a classroom where I have over 60 videos breaking down how I'm using AI tools to grow and scale my businesses. I share exact numbers, how much money I made from different things, what my costs were on different campaigns, everything that I'm doing. I talk about AI marketing, I talk about becoming an AI consultant, I talk about podcast growth hacks, AI content hacks, all sorts of really interesting things over there. So it's $19 a month. I would love to have you as a member. There's over 300 members, so it's got an awesome community of people building and doing things. They're all asking questions, sharing, and it's a great collaborative environment. So would love to have you as a member. There is a link in the description to the Hustle School community. But let's get back to what Lovable has finally has announced now that they're doing, now that they've reached $1 billion valuation, which in my mind is absolutely crazy. So they just did a Series A and it was $200 million. This is just eight months after they launched. So eight months later, they've raised $200 million. And a lot of this is just due to how much usage they have received. So it's Europe, it's based in Europe. It's a Swedish AI vibe coding startup. Basically, this was led by Accel. It's a $1.8 billion valuation. So they've Almost doubled. Doubled. Like they've all. It's not just Unicorn, like it's not border unicorn. This is almost $2 billion which is really impressive. So like Cursor or a lot of other companies essentially this helps developers to write code. You can build apps by using the coding and reasoning abilities of a lot of these AI models. It's based in Stockholm and so far it has been growing really fast. It has more than 2.3 million active users which is absolutely incredible. And these are basically using Lovables for free tier. So I think that's the most important thing is it's, there's a lot of users. Basically most of them are on the free tour. But their CEO recently, Anton, he was, he was doing this talk and he said that they do have over 180,000 paying subscribers. So there is a lot of people that are also paying for this, you know, 2 million for free, 180,000 paying. And they just reached an annual recurring revenue of about $75 million. They did that in seven months. So this is, you know, $10 million in annual recurring revenue a month. I'm going to give them some slack. I think that they're doing a fantastic job. So this is a series A round. It was, it had a bunch of, you know, people that had invested in the prior rounds in there. There was 20 VC by founders, credendum, Hummingbird, Visionary Club. So back in February Credendum actually led a $15 million pre series round to the company and back then it had about $17 million and 30,000 paying customers and then only spent $2 million at that point. So $2 million, 17 million in, in annual recurring revenue. Really impressive. And now of course they've grown this to over 180,000 users and $75 million so growing very, very fast. What's interesting is I think they're, they're doing all of this with basically 45 employees, full time employees that are, that are a pretty small lean team considering the outcome and what they've been able to accomplish here. Most of their traction has come from basically non technical users who are using it to create prototypes. They're using this to essentially, basically you're building like a prototype of like a website or an app or a tool and you give it to a developer who can build a more fleshed out version of that. The thing that I think is interesting about this is like I've done a lot of work with Adobe XD and Figma designing my own startup AI box and, and this is kind of interesting because it's a whole nother level where you're actually building a lot of the code that goes in the back end. Now a lot of them might just be like front end code and design how it looks. But that's so much more useful than giving a developer, in my opinion, a Figma design. Although there are some cool tools that help Figma convert to code. But giving them a Figma design versus giving them like, oh, here's like a thing I coded up. Go build the functionality, go make it work. But basically this is what I want. Like to me that's very, very cool. So there's this and then there's also tests which are a huge percentage of the 10 million projects that have been created on the platform to date. But Lovable right now is trying to become much more than that. This is kind of, I think the first step for them. They're only eight months old but they eventually are going to plan on making this so you can actually build production grade applications and you know, fully built out businesses and apps on the platform, which is, which is a big, which is a big task to do. So this is what their CEO said, he said every day brilliant founders and operators with game changing ideas hit the same wall. They don't have a developer to realize the vision quickly and easily. This is basically what they're trying to do. So one thing I did think that was interesting, their CEO, he was over on X and he said that he's now an angel investor in a software startup that was actually built on Lovable. So I think he's trying to show you, look, you can actually build serious companies with us. I think if you kind of dig into the background of what companies are on there. It seems like this might be an ad testing platform called Stardust that I was looking into a little bit. If you go to their website, it says that they're the first place winner at Build Launch Win, which was hosted by Lovable, eleven Labs, suvabase and Anthropic. So I think this is probably the company that he's specifically backed. Another interesting thing that he mentioned though is that uh, they're someone that built on their platform. There was an app made by a big Brazilian education company. They were using Lovable and he said that they passed $3 million in 48 hours with the tool that they use. I think this could help be a whole nother growth avenue and really help them get new customers, including I think Klarna and HubSpot and some other big customers. They've been able to get. So overall, very exciting to see what's happening with lovable excited about this company. I'll keep you up to date on everything they do to grow. If you're interested in growing and scaling your own business with AI tools, make sure to go check out the AI Hustle School community. There's a link in the description. I will catch you in the next episode and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.