Menlo Ventures doubles down as Lovable reaches $13.3 billion valuation in eight months
Key Takeaways
- •Lovable raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, nearly doubling its worth from a $6.6 billion valuation eight months earlier.
- •The European Union became a Lovable shareholder for the first time through the Scaleup Europe Fund, an EQT-managed vehicle aimed at keeping European startups from relocating or listing in the United States.
- •Lovable surpassed a $500 million annualized run rate in June and is on pace to approach $600 million by the end of August, nearly triple its December level.
- •Since launching in November 2024, the platform has hosted over 60 million projects and now reaches employees at approximately two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies.
- •Menlo Ventures described Lovable as its largest single investment after Anthropic, while the competitive landscape includes Replit and Cursor, the latter being acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion.
Lovable raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, as the Stockholm-based startup continues to turn plain-language prompts into working software, part of a broader wave of AI tools that let people build applications without writing traditional code.
The company said the new price roughly doubled in eight months, and for the first time the European Union entered its shareholder list.
Brussels backs Lovable to help keep it in Europe
Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund co-led Lovable's Series C, the company said in a blog post on August 12. Menlo also wrote the lead check in Lovable's previous round in December 2025.
That December financing totaled $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation, with CapitalG as co-lead. Alphabet's venture arm and Nvidia also participated in that round.
Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy said Lovable will be the firm's biggest single investment after Anthropic. He called the deal "a testament to how bullish we are on Lovable's outlook."
The latest round drew new investors including Balderton Capital, Carmignac, Kaszek Ventures, Tencent, World Innovation Lab, and Regent. Returning backers include Accel, Antler, CapitalG, DST Global, HubSpot Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
The Scaleup Europe Fund is an EU investment vehicle managed by Swedish asset manager EQT. Lovable is one of the fund's first disclosed investments from a pool of about €5 billion, making the European Commission a shareholder in the company.
The backing comes amid a long-running European pattern in which startups scale at home and later move to the US to raise capital and pursue listings. EQT partner Victor Englesson said that when companies such as Lovable are backed mostly by US investors, the pressure to relocate or list in America becomes stronger.
Englesson pointed to Nscale, a British company preparing for a US listing, as an example of the pattern Brussels wants to change.
Balderton general partner Daniel Waterhouse said he has known chief executive Anton Osika since the GPT Engineer project, an open-source AI coding experiment that attracted significant developer attention before evolving into Lovable. Lovable "is evidence that the most important AI companies can be built right here in Europe," Waterhouse said. Osika has said Europe's challenge is confidence rather than talent.
A $500 million run rate meets a crowded market
Lovable reached a $500 million annualized run rate in June. By the end of August, the company is on pace for a run rate near $600 million, close to triple its December level.
The startup launched in November 2024. Co-founder Fabian Hedin said people have created more than 60 million projects on the platform, including 1.2 million new projects each week and more than 900 million monthly visits to what users build.
Adidas, Nvidia, and Deutsche Telekom use Lovable to build internal tools. In its blog post, the company also listed Zendesk, Checkr, and Handshake as users.
Lovable said that in its first year it reached employees at half of the Fortune 500, and that figure is now closer to two-thirds. The company also signed a multiyear Google Cloud deal in June that increased its usage fivefold.
Competition in AI-powered software creation remains intense. Replit was valued at $9 billion in March. In June, Musk's SpaceX agreed to buy rival Cursor for $60 billion. Traditional no-code website builders are also feeling the pressure. Cryptopolitan reported in May that Wix cut about 20% of its workforce as users shifted toward so-called vibe-coding startups, a term popularized to describe building software through natural-language conversation with AI rather than manual programming.
Zendesk product director Jorge Luthe said tools like Lovable "can't provide the level of reliability at scale" that his company needs for customer requests.
Osika has said Lovable will make secured code the default and will route tasks between whatever AI models are best suited for them rather than locking into a single lab.
The new capital will be used to expand headcount, with Lovable planning to grow to about 450 staff this year. The company also plans to expand in Latin America and increase security work.
The round comes as Nvidia and other backers continue to pour money into European technology, a trend Cryptopolitan tracked earlier this year.
