Europe's fastest growing startup?
Lovable’s path to $30M ARR in 4 months and $75M ARR in 8 months
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
I’m probably not the first to tell you about Lovable.
The Swedish AI coding startup grew from $0 to $10M ARR in only 60 days. Then they hit $17M ARR and 30,000 customers in 90 days – giving Lovable the reported distinction of being perhaps Europe’s fastest-growing startup. And now? $30M ARR in 120 days.
The company told me they’ve burned a mere $2M to get there. They did it with a team of 18 people, which translates into more than $1M ARR per employee (🤯).
It would be an understatement to say that this traction is impressive. Not only is it impressive, it’s practically unheard of in my 15 years of working with startups.
Even still, I was conflicted about whether to write about Lovable’s growth in this newsletter. A cool product meets viral word-of-mouth growth is great for Lovable, but that’s only so helpful for the rest of us (newsletter writers included!).
Spoiler: the story was so fascinating that I eventually caved. Keep reading for my interview with Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Osika – along with what the ‘rest of us’ can learn from their viral growth.
Editor’s note: As of July 2025, Lovable reached $75M ARR roughly eight months since its launch. The company announced a $200M Series A round at a $1.8 billion valuation. They’ve maintained a small team of 45 people.
The backstory: 18 months of building before breakout success
Lovable’s growth has seemingly come from out of nowhere. The reality is that Anton built an early proto-version of Lovable, called gpt-engineer, back in June 2023 while he was CTO at another startup. The project was a hit, blowing up on GitHub with “hundreds of thousands” of users and more than 50,000 GitHub stars.
Seeing the demand, Anton decided to build a company around gpt-engineer. His ambitions grew, too, as Anton believed he could have so much more impact driving change not just for developers, but for anyone with a great idea (no coding background required).
This led to a dedicated GPT Engineer app, which initially launched in December 2023 without much fanfare. Anton and team kept iterating.
They launched a better version in August 2024; it saw modest success, but growth quickly flatlined. GPT Engineer turned into Lovable in late November 2024, which is when growth started to truly explode.
What happened over those twelve months?
Lovable found a way to stop its AI from getting ‘stuck’
The team made improvements to allow Lovable to perform well on large codebases, unlocking the potential for ‘real’ use cases and greater reliability
They rebranded from GPT Engineer to Lovable to raise awareness about how much better the product had become
The TL;DR: Nail product-market fit with early customers before shifting attention to growth.
How Lovable keeps going viral online
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