Lovable Raised $400 Million, and Europe Just Got Its Biggest Vibe Coding Bet
The Stockholm startup that turns plain English into working apps doubled its valuation to $13.3 billion in eight months. 60 million projects have been built on it, and an EU fund helped lead the round.
Lovable confirmed on August 12 that it has raised $400 million in a Series C round at a $13.3 billion valuation. That is roughly double the $6.6 billion it was worth in December, eight months ago. The round was led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund, an EU backed investment vehicle run by EQT, with Tencent, Balderton Capital and a dozen other investors from Europe, Latin America and Asia joining.
If you have not come across it, Lovable is the most prominent European example of what the industry has started calling vibe coding: you describe the website or app you want in ordinary language, and the system writes and hosts the actual software. The Stockholm company launched commercially in November 2024. It now says people have created more than 60 million projects on the platform, that apps built with it draw over 900 million visits a month, and that annualised revenue passed $500 million in June and is tracking towards $600 million by the end of August. It also runs its own in house trained model alongside the usual frontier options, and signed a multiyear Google Cloud deal in June for a fivefold capacity increase.
The valuation is striking mostly because the competition is not thinning out. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Cursor and Replit are all pushing AI deeper into software development, and investors are clearly betting the market supports several large platforms rather than consolidating around one. But the more interesting shift is about who writes software at all. Development tools were built for programmers. These tools are being used by designers, founders, marketers and small business owners who have an idea and no code. The hard part simply moves downstream: maintaining, testing, securing and scaling whatever the AI produced. That is not a hypothetical worry. Yesterday’s news included a $45 million round for Blacksmith, a startup whose entire business is checking the flood of machine generated code before it reaches production.
What this means for you: if you have an idea for a small internal tool, a booking page or a simple app, the honest answer in 2026 is that you can probably build a working version yourself in an afternoon, and Lovable is one of a handful of places to try it. That is a genuine change and it is worth using. The caveat is equally real: getting something working and getting something safe to put customer data into are different problems, and the second one still needs someone who understands what was built. Treat the output as a first draft that happens to run, not as finished software. And if you are in the EU, note who co-led this round. Public European money is now openly trying to keep a category winner on this side of the Atlantic.
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/lovable-confirms-new-13-3b-valuation-raises-another-400m/
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