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 think software engineers might be in a echo chamber around Lovable and apps like this. It would have been a surprise to me too, as I also build software for a living, but it just so happens that I also run a company - in the same space as lovable - so I can give you some real examples:
1. Dance school management SaaS
2. Classified sites for Netherlands
3. An old school website hosting service
All of these were built by entrepreneurs who do not have a tech background. And by no tech background, I mean most of them dont know github, some of them dont know reddit and some of them dont know linkedin. The way they 'backup' their work is by taking successive dumps of the entire folder on local.
They already know that the business of software is one of the better businesses out there. Till now the option they had was to outsource to a dev shop - which will set them back to $10k-$50k atleast - but they intutively understand that the business may or may not work. So they were on the fence.
Now they build themselves - each of the three above have spent around $2k-$5k on our platform over the last quarter. Some of the businesses are working, some not so much - some are trodding along. So these guys do some updates here and there - are figuring out marketing over time - but if it seems like its not taking off, they start building the next thing on their mind. And once they 'understand' a platform they stick to it. Couple of grands dropped to build their next idea is the cheapest they have ever paid.
Not at all - how do you build a classified site on Wix/Framer ? Afaik they are for only static/marketing sites - plus a cms to host a blog.
These are all apps with multi-tenancy - database backed - payment integrations - the works. The classified site (marketcity.org) has features like user chats/dms, social media sharing, paid upgrades etc.
Actually now the capabilities are dramatically increasing - you can now vibecode like a python based image/video processing pipeline directly - all through a webapp. And very soon - something more ambitious, like finetune an LLM - again all through a simple chat webapp.
Lovable is effectively "next gen Wix", which itself was "next gen Wordpress", which was "next gen Dreamweaver". It's simply the natural evolution of products that solve the problem "build a website without being a coder".
Every generation is hailed as the end of all things, because it's always better than the previous one, but the core need they serve are the same.
That thinking is going to die pretty soon. Unless you’re building the groundbreaking foundations that requires heavy capital profitability is going to be a huge concern and soon - but that’s just one undercapitalized man’s opinion :)
Also - profitability or margin makes a big difference. Most folks are capable of selling $2B for $1B. Obviously not the case here if they’re doing 500M on a 400M raise, but you get the point.
Presumably they'll aim for IPO or getting acquihired before then. Most startups these days aren't meant to build anything lasting, they're designed to line up an exit from day zero. It's an established, mature business model now.
The whole business model is poisonous and extractive. 90% of the businesses launched aren't valid, and then the few that are get bought up by oligopolists/monopolists.
I'd bet on them. Brand and models will get cheaper. Can engineer to use cheaper open models. Secret sauce can be in that context engineering and becoming a "cloud" themselves to get cheaper inference.
How is that different than literally any other SaaS raising big rounds? Profitability is apparently only important for AI companies, and even being more profitable than most SV startups since the inception of this site is not good enough.
I know, it’s still funny to me after all the years here. It works for some and doesn’t for others and it always looks insane from the outside before it works.
It replaced Figma for us. Product and design use it to build interactive mockups, sometimes directly with the (prospective) customers. Even a few thousands are pocket change if it means you can build the correct thing directly.
Lovable is well suited to take over from Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress ... any static websites or simple apps that amount to a shop front. It's a market most serious software developers don't care about but still needs to be serviced and catered to.
This is because even in most serious tech companies the main website is considered marketing rather than part of the product.
Doubt. My daughter wanted to make a static web to publish illustrated stories she made an such. I happened to have a Loveable subscription I forgot to cancel so I figured she can at least prototype it there.
Well, it did the web site alright, the process was smooth. She even asked AI to translate stories and it just did.
But the problem is that it was not what I would call a static web site: it was React bullshit, a SPA. The content was actually in typescript !!! Given that it's not actually static content it won't get indexed.
(And I really doubt SSR would be a good solution here.)
GP might be right though. It'll ship with and advertise a few components that do require a degree of dynamics that Wix/Squarespace can't do as easily, and people will jump.
Why do I think that? Because that's exactly what happened to regular webshit coding some decade+ ago. That's how SPAs were born. That's why React is a thing in the first place. Long time ago, someone figured how to make a complex app in a browser, then someone else figured some trivial aspect of the site looks nicer when done in JS (back in the ancient times where networking was slow and bandwidth was tight), and suddenly every static page everywhere got rewritten into a bloated SPA, and spawned a whole absurdly well-paid industry to support it.
This is not the kind of problem most people care about. It looks good, it works, it's good enough. They will likely build their audience outside of search engines anyway.
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.
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.
i've got old friends who have been telling me about the same app idea they've had for 10 years and are now spending 1000s on Lovable tokens. This isn't sustainable customers. It's delusional people spending money on the wrong thing. Their ideas were not good before they could "code it". Their ideas are still not good now that they can.
Sign companies stay in business. Because every new startup restaurant wants its own sign. That particular restaurant being statistically doomed is actually a benefit to the sign company. I guess maybe you meant not sustainable for the half baked businesses. It seems like it could be sustainable for lovable.
I worked directly with them. I guess youtube isn't recommending the videos to you but you can find them all there. Atleast do the minimum before you refute. A single kid created complex opensource software that is being used by all these apps too, and it has been acquired by supabase. That dudes software is infested with AI bugs. I'm really doing you a favor by telling you all of this. I advise you to stop caring about software and adapt to become more product oriented.
Also AI will generate better code than you ever will in your entire career, bugs included.
The software world might split into programming language scientists who care about "code" and product-oriented who care about the tangible product. Anyone in between (who fight about what code looks like) should disappear.
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!