Lovable was founded in Stockholm in 2023 by two Swedes: Anton Osika, the chief executive, and Fabian Hedin, the chief technology officer. Both are former students of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and both worked at the Stockholm AI startup Depict before turning Osika's open-source project GPT Engineer into a company. As of October 2026, Lovable is one of Europe's most valuable AI startups, with a $13.3 billion valuation set in August 2026.
Anton Osika: physics, CERN and two AI startups
Osika trained as a physicist. According to KTH's own profile of the founders, he studied engineering physics at the university, taking courses at double pace. His published biography lists research and engineering work linked to the ATLAS experiment at CERN early in his career.
He then moved into startups:
- Sana Labs – he joined the Stockholm AI learning company as its first employee in 2016, KTH says.
- Depict – in 2020 he co-founded Depict.ai, an e-commerce recommendation startup, with Oliver Edholm and served as its CTO.
- GPT Engineer – in spring 2023 he published GPT Engineer on GitHub, an open-source tool that asks a large language model to write a whole codebase from a plain-language prompt. The project drew a flood of attention almost overnight.
Fabian Hedin: from TenFast to Lovable's CTO
Hedin studied industrial economics at KTH and, while still a student, started TenFast, a software company for property management, and KTH notes that he took part in its KTH Innovation Launch programme. He later led the front-end team at Depict, where he worked alongside Osika.
In a Notion interview published in October 2025, Hedin traced his path from running Minecraft servers in high school to co-founding Lovable. As CTO he is responsible for the platform that turns chat prompts into working web apps.
How the two founders started Lovable
The company grew straight out of the GPT Engineer response. KTH reports that within hours of the GitHub release taking off, Osika and his friend Hedin, who had also worked together at Depict, agreed to build a company around it. The first commercial product was called GPT Engineer App.
Key milestones, taken from Lovable's own announcements:
- 2023 – company founded in Stockholm.
- November 2024 – public launch; the one-year anniversary post is dated 18 November 2025.
- December 2024 – GPT Engineer App rebranded as Lovable.
- February 2025 – $15 million funding round led by Creandum.
- 17 July 2025 – $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation from Accel.
- 18 November 2025 – Osika reports $200 million in annual recurring revenue.
- 18 December 2025 – $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures' Anthology fund.
- 12 August 2026 – $400 million Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation, led by Menlo Ventures with EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund as co-lead.
In the Series C announcement Lovable said it planned to grow to about 450 team members during 2026. It also said Stockholm stays its headquarters as it expands in London, Boston, San Francisco and New York.
Recognition and the Founders Pledge
In September 2025 KTH named Osika and Hedin the 2025 winners of the KTH Innovation Award, a prize funded by donations from Spotify founder Daniel Ek and KTH professor Mathias Uhlén. The award recognises their aim of opening software creation to people who cannot code.
Both founders have signed the Founders Pledge, committing to give half of their proceeds to charity if Lovable succeeds. KTH also lists them as part of Project Europe, an initiative that backs young European founders. Osika has repeatedly argued for building in Europe rather than moving to Silicon Valley, a choice he credited for the company's growth in a November 2025 TechCrunch interview.
For more profiles of the people behind European startups, see our Founders section, and follow funding news in Startups and AI.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the founders of Lovable?
Anton Osika (CEO) and Fabian Hedin (CTO) founded Lovable in Stockholm in 2023.
What country are Lovable's founders from?
Both are Swedish and studied at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where the company is still headquartered.
What did Anton Osika do before Lovable?
His Wikipedia biography mentions early work related to CERN's ATLAS experiment. He joined Sana Labs as its first employee in 2016, co-founded Depict in 2020 as CTO and released the open-source GPT Engineer in 2023.
