Lovable raises $400M Series C

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• Hacker News
• Where are all the big world-changing apps that were vibe coded on this platform?
  by mrhottakes
• if you are only seeking that in order to be impressed you are not very good at the business at tech
  by swyx
• In general, people/companies attempt to hide their use of AI when building apps/services since there's an ongoing substantial effort from progressives to cancel that shit. That stated reasons vary, but the trend is very, very clear.
  by lysace
• 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!

  by alexashka
• It’s quite embarrassing how bad it is. Fair play to the founders making bank on the ai hype though
  by merrvk
• Similar story: signed up at https://app.emergent.sh, funded by YC; total crap. Btw, they've raised over $100M
  by mandeepj
• 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

  by Frannky
• The beauty of venture capital is that VCs don't really know either but they allow themselves to be presuaded by the founders.

  Its a beautiful thing.

  by keeptrying
• If you're a non technical person and just want to vibe code a website, I would suspect that Codex/Claude Code is far too intimidating for them. It requires a level of pre-existing knowledge. Lovable definitely caters to making these things accessible to a non-technical audience, which there's definitely a market for.
  by dbbk
• My hypothesis based on my discussions with non tech friends. If you can go from (prompt > website > deployment), such that you have a site on the web basically from behind one login.

  That's very valuable, I basically think (we) devs often overestimate the average persons willingness to learn tech. Similar to dropbox back in the days.

  Of course nothing is stopping OpenAI, Claude to do literally the same, maybe they already have? I don't follow the scene that much.

  by tripledry
• My personal mental model is that this is the AI version of the low-code web app tools that have existed for a while (like Outsystems, Power Apps...). Those tools are a bit of a nightmare for devs to work with and they have all sorts of limitations. Yet they still carved themselves a fairly significant niche in the market, as they allow building apps fairly quickly and cheaply... as long as you stick to simple apps. I don't know if Lovable will be able to capture that market, but that's how I try to make sense of this.
  by yfontana
• > 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.

  With Claude Code etc. you still have to decide on a tech stack, frameworks or libraries to build on. Lovable is basically an agentic harness with Tanstack Start and Supabase setup for you + quick integrations for services online businesses typically use.

  Basically like a JS dev boilerplate + agent in a box.

  Their main advantage is they were kind of a first mover in that space before harnesses or agents etc. were even discussed.

  by rramon
• The problem with your mental model is that you're thinking the product is "code" when the product is "a finished product"

  CC is a horrible product for building a finished website. With CC you still have to host it somewhere. On Vercel, get a DB somewhere or tell it to use SQLite, which no one knows what that is. You have to install it and use a terminal which no one knows how to do. Even if you already know how to code, surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase. You might not use it, but for sure it is easier.

  In terms of what products get built and how it's sustainable, think internal tools and what people who can't code would like to build but weren't able to.

  Internal tools, things like CreatorIQ is ~$30k a year. It would be nice to make an internal tool just to manage the creators you have and save that money External Projects, A friend built a fantasy leauge for niche sports is making money on it.

  I would love to hear the argument as to why CC is better for those two use cases when the products work great, its cheaper than CC (both are subsidizing so that is not a good rebuttal), and there is less maintenance (in the future, you could imagine loveable automatically sweeping projects for deps, security issues, etc)

  by motoxpro
• 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.

  by adi2907

•   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.
  

  Most founders in these accelerators must be fairly young? Therefore, most of them have never developed real applications without tools like Lovable even if they're technical founders.

  IE. they might not be comfortable with the terminal, messing with SQL databases, etc.

  For someone like me who have developed production apps the old way, terminal-based agents with my chosen stack is my preferred way.

  by aurareturn
• 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.

  by bix6
• Just to be clear that's ARR one month signups and short terms sign ups are included in this madness.
  by minraws
• Churn for these no code businesses has to be off the charts. I wouldn’t count this revenue to hold once everyone had their first try.
  by xenospn
• 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.

  by jbdamask
• one click deployments are stupid and useless. you should have the agent walk you through building the deployment scripts and process.
  by ceehex
• OpenAI has a feature they rolled out several weeks ago called Sites that takes care of deployment with one click (hosting, database, auth). It’s so much easier for non-technical now to vibe code and publish their app
  by jnathsf
• There is too much friction in deploying internal tools. I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun to solve that. Full GitOps (create/update your app through GitOps, not just updating app source code), staged deployments, service bindings (for getting a managed database credential, instead of creating a new database per app) and OIDC/SAML with RBAC.
  by ajayvk
• 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.

  by edoceo
• 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.

  by podviaznikov
• One of my cousins built an ERP for a factory he was managing. It looked great, and seemed to work great. He has no technical background, and seeing the app work gave me real paranoia about my job security.

  However, when I looked underneath the code, it was a mess. Biggest problem I saw in the brief time I spent looking at it's internals was that it wasn't using foreign keys in database. Sales invoices had customer info duplicated, and not referenced from the customer table like any sane developer would do. Same thing with purchase orders and supplier info.

  AI coded apps look great at surface level, but contains huge footguns underneath.

  by dpacmittal
• I recently consulted for a vibe-founder who built yet-another ai voice chat and what shocked me about lovable was the lock-in. The supabase backend is completely inaccessible except through the lovable interface. You don’t have a supabase account, you can’t manage any of it directly.

  The limits are also restrictive unless you wanna empty your bank account. I guess cheaper than paying us full time though.

  by allthetime
• There's one time I meant to search somebody's email address in our internal system but I accidentally searched it in Google instead because I forgot to put in the custom search operator in the URL/search bar

  I actually got a Google search result back because a business's internal CMS and marketing systems had gotten indexed which had their full email list with the capabilities to delete and send newsletters. The email address I searched had subscribed to this business's newsletter which got it indexed

  It appeared it was built by Lovable

  I'm all for vibe coding too but there's a good chance when people do it they are leaking data like this

  by weird-eye-issue
• 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!

  by sailfast
• https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playboo...

  worth the listen. They hit profitability because of their power users, who are a mixed bag of complete novices and expert SWE's, both of whom spend 10x+ the tokens of the average user. So, basically, their value prop and pricing have hit a sweet spot for a certain marketshare.

  by popalchemist
• Thx for the replies - also didn’t occur to me that the company may want to build their own data centers to get off expensive token dependencies if the LLMs are core to the business. I keep considering these like raw software plays but they’re not always - and if you can’t use the capacity in the end you can always rent it to somebody else. Probably a no brainer for investors to loan money for chips these days… though I think more brains should be looking at that play.
  by sailfast