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Elena Verna, head of growth at AI vibe coding startup Lovable, is far more worried about AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic than about smaller rival startups. 

Lovable is a “vibe coding” platform that lets people build full apps using natural‑language prompts instead of traditional programming. The platform offers a free tier as well as its bread and butter: starting at $25 per month for individuals. 

Founded in 2024, Lovable has grown with unusual speed, surpassing the coveted $100 million in annual recurring revenue within eight months and then doubling that to over $200 million just four months later, per . 

Despite this growth, Verna is hesitant to have Lovable rest on its laurels — and she is acutely aware of the threat posed by bigger companies. 

Larger companies have more distribution power, Verna explained on a recent episode of the . In a sector where products are becoming more similar and harder to tell apart, the winning growth strategy is to have more of a built-in customer segment, she said. For example, ChatGPT had as of last month. 

“Whoever has the best distribution that is earned, that is competitively defensible, that is sustainable, that is predictable, is going to be the winner in the market,” Verna said on the podcast. “I worry about the companies that have that figured out.”

That fear crystallized when Anthropic Claude Code last year, bundling the code generation tool into its Pro plan of . Engineers about their other vibe coding subscriptions like Cursor and Lovable and sticking with Claude Code, arguing that it felt like “” from engineer to engineer manager. 

“I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world,” Verna said on the podcast. “So, OpenAIs, Anthropics, Googles, Apples, more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from sideways.”

Lovable continues to expand

Despite the presence of large-scale competitors, Lovable continues to grow by leaps and bounds. By late 2025, the company raised a led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures at a , more than tripling its from a funding round just months prior.

This month, reported that Lovable had hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue, a 30% increase from February. Ryan Meadows, Lovable’s chief revenue officer, told Business Insider that the platform now sees 200,000 new vibe coding projects started daily, with the majority of users being non-technical founders and entrepreneurs. 

Meadows added that the company plans to hire extensively this year, more than doubling its headcount from 146 to 350 employees.