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This article was published on October 7, 2024

Stockholm startup Lovable raises $7.5M for AI coding assistant

The Swedish company is promising to make everyone a dev


Stockholm startup Lovable raises $7.5M for AI coding assistant

Stockholm-based Lovable has raised $7.5mn in pre-seed funding for its newly-launched AI coding assistant that promises to make everyone a dev.

Dubbed GPT Engineer, the AI coding tool generates production-ready code in real-time, without requiring developer experience. According to the startup, users need only chat with the assistant to build websites and web apps.

“We want to expand the world’s coding capabilities beyond the current 1% of the population who can program, and make software more accessible as a result,” Anton Osika, co-founder of Lovable, said in a statement.

The GPT Engineer

GPT Engineer is powered by customised Lange Language Models (LLMs) with vision capabilities, from providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. Lovable says that, thanks to its advanced reasoning, the AI assistant can autonomously create and debug applications, while maintaining their integrity.

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It can also recognise user intent, provide instant feedback, and understand when to ask for user input based on its limitations.

The coding assistant can be synced with GitHub, where its open-source Command Line Interface (CLI) version currently counts over 52,000 GitHub stars.

Preview of the GPT Engineer, an AI coding assistant
Preview of the GPT Engineer platform. Source: Lovable

Osika founded Lovable together with Fabian Hedin in 2023. They’re both serial entrepreneurs with a strong background in software development and AI.

With the fresh capital, Lovable plans to attract more European talent to its team and to boost its compute resources, data collection, and refinement.

Hummingbird VC and byFounders led the funding round, with participation from major Nordic funds, private, and angel investors, including Mattias Miksche, Shopify’s Siavash Ghorbani, Voi’s Fredrik Hjelm, and Creandum co-founder Stefan Lindeberg.

“Lovable is entering the market at a crucial time when the demand for software development far outpaces the available talent,” said Firat Ileri, partner at Hummingbird.

“Web apps make up 80% of the software we interact with today, yet only a small minority of people can build them.”

Lovable’s funding comes amid a wider boom for the AI-powered coding market. Last week, San-Francisco based Poolside raised a staggering $500mn — without even having launched a product yet.

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