A $400 million round, a doubled valuation

Lovable, the Stockholm-based startup that lets people build software applications by describing them in plain language, has closed a $400 million Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation. That is more than double the $6.6 billion valuation it commanded after a $330 million Series B just eight months earlier, in December 2025. Menlo Ventures, which also led the Series B, co-led this round alongside the Scaleup Europe Fund, a vehicle managed by EQT.

New backers in the round include Balderton Capital, Carmignac, Kaszek Ventures, LTS Growth, Tencent, World Innovation Lab and Regent. Returning investors are Accel, Antler, CapitalG, DST Global, Evantic Capital, HubSpot Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Lovable says the fresh capital will help it grow toward 450 employees and expand its offices in London, Boston, San Francisco and New York.

Brussels' first marquee bet

The more interesting name on the cap table is the Scaleup Europe Fund itself. It is a roughly five billion euro vehicle backed by the European Commission and managed by EQT, built for one explicit purpose: to write checks large enough that a European AI company does not have to raise almost exclusively from Silicon Valley, or move its headquarters to the United States, in order to scale. Lovable's round is understood to be one of the fund's first high-profile portfolio deals since it went live.

That makes this round a live test of European industrial policy. Brussels has watched its most promising AI and software companies repeatedly relocate or raise almost entirely on American money once they reach growth stage. A euro-denominated, EU-anchored fund co-leading a $400 million round for a Swedish company, standing beside Menlo Ventures instead of being squeezed out by it, is the clearest evidence yet that European capital can compete for the continent's best AI deals.

A pressure signal for the coding-tools market

For competitors, the numbers matter as much as the story. A valuation that more than doubled in eight months, alongside Lovable's claim that roughly two-thirds of Fortune 500 employees have used the product, is a direct pressure signal against GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Replit and Bolt.new, all of which are chasing the same enterprise development budgets. Capital at this scale buys go-to-market reach and compute headroom that smaller-funded rivals will struggle to match quickly.

The raise also lands in the middle of an acquisitive month for Lovable, which recently acquired a rival team in a deal aimed more at its engineers than its product. Lovable says the new funding will also deepen the platform beyond app generation, into automated operations, payments and multi-agent orchestration, which widens the set of tools it competes against well past the coding-assistant category alone.

What EU and UK enterprise buyers should take from this

If your organisation is standardizing its developer tooling or evaluating an AI app-builder, this round changes the balance of power in that market as much as it changes Lovable's own balance sheet. A well-funded, EU-anchored vendor may ease data-residency and procurement conversations that a purely US-domiciled competitor cannot, while a valuation this size buys the roadmap speed to keep closing feature gaps with incumbents.

None of that makes the vendor decision for you, and Lovable's expansion into payments and automated operations will widen what your security and compliance teams need to review before any wider rollout. The sensible move now is to revisit vendor shortlist assumptions this quarter rather than wait for the next renewal cycle to force the question.