Lovable raises $400M Series C

"For most people, turning an idea into software once required so much capital, technical fluency, and time that many ideas never came to life. Lovable’s first chapter was about changing that. "

That goes so well with "Lovable raises $400M Series C"

This is just a bet that the models will get better and that all the half baked never seen production Lovable apps will be able to be brought life because of that. I am fading that bet personally and am bearish on non technical people building software

This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going?

And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?

I’ve never heard of this company. Maybe that’s because I build software for a living.

How many years of insane growth would it take to pay back $400M at this rate?

What. Is. Happening?!

$13.3B valuation? They mention Adidas, Nvidia, etc but their “favorite” use cases are toy apps inside smaller firms.

The play here has to be “our model of building companies via agent workflows and websites is the best” otherwise TAM numbers are just nutty. Smoke it while you got it I guess and congrats on the raise!

I was skeptical about Lovable as software engineer until I saw it used.

Last month I visited warehouse in Berlin.

People who work there(with no technical background) build over 15 lovable apps for themselves -> starting from checkin system, to very sophisticated dashboards.

Those were non technical people, and they did all with no engineers or IT.

Those apps they were using were better than 90% of internal apps I've seen in my career.

Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play.

Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.

Enterprises need a solution like Lovable or Replit if only for the one-touch deployments. Unfortunately, neither tool is there.

I don't know what's taking Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, even AWS to build deployments themselves. There are only a handful of reference architectures for vibe-coded apps.

I read the announcement honestly sounds like they are doing some cool things.

A year ago they had 180k paying customers. If we generously put them all on biz at $50/mo that’s $9M/mo or $108M/yr. Pro gives half that. They say now they have $500M run rate. So 5x+ growth in a year? Nice.

Lovable is the Wordpress of today. No developer worth his salt would have touched Wordpress to develop websites but it was a boon to non developers who could use its templates. Lovable fills the same need for non techies today

I was confounded when many in my accelerator batch were using Lovable to string up demos when Claude Code would have done the same with much better controls. Thing is terminals, repos dont appeal to most.

That said, Replit, Lovable, Emergent are making hay till frontier labs dont release a wrapper agent app to do what they do.

When I don't understand why things happen, I assume the problem is my mental model. In this case, I can't build a model where pouring $400M into Lovable makes sense.

Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition?

I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code.

And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand.

I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better.

So the assumptions seem to be: - Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise. - Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way. - LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result

Cool. Signed up for Lovable, chose a web template, got this:

"When remixing a template, I agree to take responsibility over project security, compliance, data, and operations. The templates are provided for educational purposes and do not guarantee functionality or security out of the box."

With copy/paste disabled, so I had to type it out.

I rest my case, your honor.

---

Update: Spent 2 more minutes - I cannot believe anyone invested a penny in this. It makes those other dozen failed web site editor things look very well made and thought out.

It makes Squarespace look like a good product!

Where are all the big world-changing apps that were vibe coded on this platform?

I appreciate what Lovable did as far as contributing to giving people agency over technology to build things, whether they were ideally built or not, from an engineering perspective.

I can't help but feel deep down somewhere inside though - boy.. $400M is so much money - whenever I see these kind of huge raises, I kind of wonder, how likely is it to fail when you have been granted such an enormous opportunity, plus all the other money they've raised.

This question isn't limited to Lovable of course.. but it's just.. wow.. it's so much runway... will they end up spending it wisely? I feel like a lot of companies end up spending this on scaling out sales, sales engineering, marketing, advertising, splinter/side efforts, tons of hiring/headcount expansion, global expansion, acquisitions... and this often makes the companies big, slow-moving behemoths, but does it really advance the core mission, technology, infra, etc.?

Will be interesting to see where this takes lovable. Congratulations to their team!

Read today that Lovable is basically just an Anthropic front end. Seems to me that when Anthropic is ready to eat this niche, they'll easily outcompete Lovable.

In a recent interview the founder stated something like "we're enabling people to write software at a fraction of what it used to cost". I believe that to currently be true... maybe... if you're a single dev building something that Lovable can be used for.

What I'm struggling to understand is that _someone_ is paying, right? $400M is probably a lot more than a fraction of what people spent on javascript CRUD apps before? It seems more like centralization than anything else to me? What am I missing?

There are a lot of people with domain expertise or know a workflow in their own business so well they know exactly what a solution looks like. And AI can build a solution today or will be able to in the near future - I have been blown away for example, by how lawyers are using AI to automate real work. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even if it’s not perfect and does not scale to 1bn users. I wouldn’t under estimate the potential here.

I am less bullish on this idea that every peeps will have ideas for great things to build

I love using Lovable. It's so much better than Codex/ClaudeCode and producing a fully working application quickly. Don't need to spend hours deploying it, giving it a database, payments, analytics, etc. It just works much faster and simpler.

My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB.

He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.

For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.

I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.

I interviewed with a startup that I thought I was a pretty good fit for. I'd had the same role at a company that did the same thing they were doing just three years ahead of them. That led to fairly nuanced interviews with each interviewer because I was familiar with their projects and more generally had a sense of what their roadmap looked like. And that put me into a final presentation interview with a bigger group that included the CEO/founders pretty quickly.

Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using."

Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.

Two years ago they were boasting of how being small (two dozen people) and using AI was the secret enabler of their growth. No bureaucracy! Product people go brrr with little developer need.

24 months later, their headcount ballooned, they are now more than 1'000.

Product keeps soft pivoting every few months and no single mediocre application built on lovable has gained any traction whatsoever, not that I've heard of it.

This is not crazy. What's crazy is one of their favourte stories, Viver de IA [Brazil], a company that uses AI to build an AI education company.

I recently replaced a Wordpress based website. I tried Claude Design, epic failure. Context windows exploding due to huge html files inlining images.

I ended up dropping it for a design guide from designer and then used Cursor to build an Astro site section by section instead of the whole page. The flexibility of having code to view and edit was way better than these black box programs.

Lovable funding is insane. And scary.

Has anyone looked closely at the security of all these Lovable-generated apps? There have been reports of serious security issues in apps built with Lovable, especially around backend/database configurations. Curious how Lovable plans to address this

Every critique I've seen of Lovable has been that while it is very easy to get started, once you cross a certain point with your app-building, it simply becomes too expensive, and complex to continue build on manually. Just like real software, ya know.

I don’t get the appeal of Lovable. How is it different from bolt.new, or Figma’s AI feature, of GitHub Spark, or the countless others?

Gaining traction or having a large marketshare cannot be the USP.

People are throwing a lot of shade on Lovable - mostly while comparing the output of non-technical people, with the output of the HN audience.

"Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel. But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation. Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that.

When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before. That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps.

... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet. But some have stuck.

what’s the moat for lovable? you can already directly prompt these models to build you a full fledged app. Sure it saves you some db setup and deployment but is that enough of a product?

Fwiw loveable is fun and enables playful little apps. I enjoy it

The brand is now the moat.

As someone who is fully bootstrapped and not looking for funding, I may be oblivious but some of the numbers I see versus the products I see i'm wondering if I should not be using my own capital and see if asking nicely can get me 200 million dollars

I’ve seen ads for this company, the ads were highlighting things you could build, things like:

“An app to find dog friendly pubs”

Most of the ideas seemed more like a Google search than an app.

I have no doubt they are letting thousands of people write code faster than ever before, but what is that code worth and who would maintain it? Deploying an app is relatively expensive and time consuming vs just using the web or buying an app. Most people can’t be bothered to do that work (and rightly so) and most apps make very little money.

I expect this to be one of the casualties of the AI bubble, once people realise they didn’t really want to run a business based on their dream app.

Synthetiq > Lovable if you actually want to get into production in any sort of real organization

$400M for a Series C is an incredible milestone. The momentum behind AI dev tools right now is insane.

Why do you need if every llm vendor has their own harness , what is the moat ?

Spacex even have multi model one

It is crazy that people still use Lovable when we have codex and claude code....

"The last piece of software" still their tagline?

I feel like this valuation could be cut by 75% if Anthropic paid more attention to Claude Design.

This is the clearest example of how companies with little differentiation fail. Enterprise companies would prefer Lovable bundled with a product they already use, ex. Figma.

You probably need vertical integration to build real AI businesses; it feels like Silicon Valley forces new paradigms, while AI feels like something that can be bundled in with existing companies. Clouds are still the distribution, the pre AI enterpise domiance remains through bundling.

Maybe OpenAI can do something special by owning the whole stack?

https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/

- i have used all 3: lovable, bolt and v0

- bolt is the best product out there. paste the same prompt and see for yourself