Anton Osika, Lovable’s chief executive and co-founder Credit: TNW “We’re way past vibes,” Lovable co-founder and chief executive Anton Osika said at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. He was answering critics who say software built with AI by people outside engineering is a security risk. Osika spoke with TIME’s Ayesha Javed in a TIME100 session at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2026. The title was “The future of work is software without a middleman”.
Javed opened with Lovable’s numbers. The Stockholm company, which bought the lovable.com domain in August, hit $200m in annual recurring revenue in less than a year, she said, and tripled that ARR in nine months. Employees at nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500 build with Lovable, and its customers include Adidas and Nvidia. Those figures match earlier reports.
TechCrunch reported the $200m milestone in November 2025, and Bloomberg reported $400m in March 2026. Lovable raised a $400m Series C at a $13.3bn valuation in August. “The people closest to the problem” Lovable’s bet is that the person with a problem should be able to build the solution. Osika said that means people with the knowledge, in marketing, finance or HR, not only engineers. “People with expertise and close to the problem, they should be the one building software, not people with certain types of certifications,” he said. According to Osika, 55% of Lovable’s customers and users have more than 11 years of work experience.
That knowledge used to sit behind engineering departments, he said. He gave the example of Nad, a leader at the healthcare staffing company Nursa. Nad set out to build a prototype for a new product line that trains nurses. He ended up building the whole product on Lovable, including scheduling and certification, Osika said.
Nursa’s leadership team then built more than ten applications to replace legacy tools across finance and operations. Agents and chat tools at the company can connect to those apps with one click, according to Osika. In another example, the 300 McDonald’s restaurants in the Nordics use a Lovable-built system to handle incidents and requests on the floor, he said. What happens to engineers Javed asked whether engineers are being cut out.
Osika said the best engineers he knows are more productive and more valuable to their businesses than before. “Now these engineers, they are rightfully rivaled by people from across the business,” he said. People without an engineering background can be very productive if they are close to the problem and have good judgment, he added. “That is the product” Solo builders taught Lovable about speed, Osika said. Enterprise customers have shifted its focus to security and trust. Once software is in front of a real customer, trust and safety “is the product”, he said.
Osika said AI is getting much better than humans at finding vulnerabilities in software. Lovable now scans every change for vulnerabilities automatically, for free, he said. External penetration testing companies rank Lovable “absolutely in the top”, according to Osika. The harder question, he said, is who can see which data inside an app.
An HR tool, for example, should show staff data only to the right managers. Lovable’s connectors, including one for Salesforce, limit what data an app can access depending on who is logged in. Administrators can see every app built in the company and which ones hold sensitive data, he said. Software engineers can also change the code with their own tools.
For enterprise buyers, Lovable has also turned to an insurance policy from Lloyd’s to cover AI risk. Osika said security teams are starting to see the platform as a way to avoid shadow IT. It is going from “this last no” to “the first yes”, he said. Lovable versus Cursor and Replit Osika also pointed to Benioff’s keynote, where Salesforce launched AIforce to bring its platform into other interfaces.
That is the future Lovable believes in too, he said. Javed asked what separates Lovable from fast-growing rivals such as Cursor and Replit. Osika pointed to guardrails: how apps connect to data, what administrators can see, and whether apps are checked for vulnerabilities before they go live. Buyers should also ask who a tool was built for, he said: engineers, or everyone else.
Lovable is built for people without a technical background. Advice for companies Osika urged companies to run internal hackathons. He said employees should pick something they are frustrated or passionate about and build a better version. The value comes when a tool is in production and someone owns it, he added.
For first projects, he advised starting with something not too ambitious. Leaders should then decide which tools to keep and which to retire. The companies that succeed let everyone experiment, Osika said, but also have judgment about what to build. “People see Europe and they think it’s slow” Asked what Americans get wrong about European AI, Osika said: “People see Europe and they think it’s slow. But if you go to the tech hubs in Europe, it’s absolutely buzzing.” Lovable has offices in Boston and New York, he said, but most of its engineers work in Stockholm.
He credited Nordic care for product detail. That is also where the company’s name comes from, he confirmed: software should make its users fall in love with it.
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