Anton Osika, CEO at Swedish unicorn Lovable on his company's recent funding round, their profitability outlook and the impact AI will have on the jobs market.

Lovable CEO Anton highlights how advances in AI have lowered barriers to software development, allowing individuals without technical backgrounds to create entire software products. He notes that this shift is fostering greater innovation and enabling more people to start businesses, as AI tools become more accessible and user-friendly.

Operating from Stockholm, Lovable has grown to a team of 45 and recently achieved a $1.8 billion valuation. Anton attributes the company's success to the availability of committed talent in Europe and a culture of efficiency. He also addresses concerns about job displacement, arguing that AI will broaden participation in the technology sector rather than reduce opportunities. Lovable's focus remains on expanding its product capabilities and supporting both entrepreneurs and large enterprises in building custom software solutions.

"Everyone can be a developer of software," says Lovable CEO

There are many reasons why people don't start a company today. They don't have the time, they don't have money, or they don't have the technical expertise. And now, thanks to AI and it being packaged in a tool where you can build entire software products, that's not the case anymore. So we're seeing a lot of human creativity that wants to start business actually being able to do so because of this change. Anton, I understand you've got a team of 45 people at this stage, but you're currently hiring on every team as you look to grow the business. We're reading and hearing that competition for top engineers in the AI space is just tremendous and you're seeing huge price tags for some of the top engineers coming out of Silicon Valley. What's been your experience in terms of what it's costing you to hire and retain top talent? Yes, so we're building Lovable from Europe and the headquarters are specifically in Stockholm, Sweden. And to some extent that has been building in hard mode, it's more difficult to get attention and build a global brand like we are now doing. But on the talent side, we have amazing talent here that is very ambitious and much easier for us to assemble into one world-class team. And I think that's one of the big reasons that we have been successful. And companies in the culture in the Nordics is a lot about efficiency and doing much more with less. So we're not experiencing that intense competition in the same way I think as other companies in other parts of the world are doing. Interesting to hear you talk about the kind of cultural importance of being used to doing more with less. You can apply that to what we've seen in China on the innovation front. They have been deprived of some of the key inputs from the US and as a result have been really innovative. Your team has said that Lovable is a Swedish success story and that it only could have been built in Europe. Why do you say that? It's about how readily available the talent is. And I also noticed that the people in the team at Lovable are really committed to the cause that we're doing and they don't see it in the same transactional way as I think many employees see building a company in other parts of the world. The team is really everything in building a product like ours that's really on the forefront of technology and what it enables for people specifically. Anton, when we talk about the technology you're bringing to market, hugely disruptive to the software industry. What does it mean in terms of the replacement of jobs? Because typically this has been industry flush with jobs for many years. But if you're providing such accessible software solutions for people, doesn't that destroy jobs at the same time? I would say that the software industry has been creating the most enterprise value over the last few decades despite how difficult and slow and frustrating it has been to develop. Now what we're going to see is that everyone can be a developer of software. And that means that people who are already technical and who are developers today, they can still have an advantage. But we're competing more at the same terms where the best companies, the best products are going to get in the hands of consumers much faster. And I think we're going to see more ability to innovate both for current engineers, software engineers, and for everyone else. And I think this is clearly an example of AI being able to have a positive impact on more people being a part of the technology industry. Anton, I keep asking questions about would-be entrepreneurs using the technology. But what about big companies? Because if they deploy the technology, they can create new business models quicker and also change a legacy parts of the business. Yes, so we're seeing huge financial companies that are customizing the software stack that they build where they previously tried to pay for SaaS, one-size-fits-non-SaaS. And they're using Lovable to make themselves much more productive in having custom software for all their internal needs. What we spoke about earlier is also a huge trend. One person can now go out and create a full specification for the next feature to build in really large Fortune 500 companies instead of writing a memo or a document that outlines this. And by writing a specification as an application, these companies, they move 10 times faster taking the right thing to all the way to the release to their users. So we're short-circuiting the process to validate and decide what to build next for really large companies. Anton, so you've just become a unicorn, $1.8 billion valuation. The last eight months have been astronomical in terms of your growth. What is the plan from here? Are you thinking IPO? What's in the works? Our focus is really just to listen and stay close to our users and enable as much capabilities and value creation for them as possible as our tool is rapidly getting new capabilities. We recently made it agentic so that it can go out and do research on the way to implementation of what a human asks for in plain English. We made the offering much more enterprise ready with releasing our business plan. And going forward, there are a lot more capabilities, integrations with everything you need to build an entire SaaS company so that it's payments, understanding your users with analytics, and we're just focused on building the best product next. What does that mean in terms of profitability? Are you profitable at this point? We raised this money so that we can move faster and utilize it. That means we're not profitable right now. But as you know, we're seeing a lot of growth and we're in a place where we can control profitability to quite a large extent.

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