Lovable Hits $6.6B Valuation as Vibe Coding Money Pours In, Edtech Money Dries Up

The sources, who asked to remain anonymous while discussing private information, told CNBC that U.S. venture firm Accel is participating in the round. Accel backed Lovable's previous round too. One of the sources said Khosla Ventures is also in. Neither Lovable, Accel nor Khosla Ventures had responded to CNBC's request for comment when the article went live.

Forbes reported in November that the round would value the company at "around" $6 billion. The final number, if CNBC's sources are right, is higher.

Three rounds in one year

Lovable was founded in 2023 and is based in Stockholm. It reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue in November, just under a year after it first hit $1 million in ARR. The company's July raise brought in $200 million. The investor list then included Creandum, Klarna founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski and Synthesia founder Victor Riparbelli.

This is the third round Lovable has closed in 2025. The company says 100,000 projects were being built on its platform every day when it announced its latest ARR figures. It is opening offices in Boston and San Francisco. Its platform leans on AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which let users build apps and websites from text prompts without writing code.

The category is expensive

Lovable is not raising in a vacuum. In the U.S., Anysphere, the company behind coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November, according to CNBC. Replit hit a $3 billion price tag in September after picking up $250 million, and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.

Those numbers frame the Lovable round as much as Lovable's own growth does. A $6.6 billion valuation on $200 million in ARR implies a multiple north of 30 times revenue. That is the sort of figure investors have been willing to pay this year for AI coding tools with fast-growing top lines. Whether the multiple holds when the category matures is a different question, and one nobody in this round has had to answer yet.

The other end of the market

The contrast with education technology is stark. Global edtech investment peaked at $16.7 billion in 2021, according to Tracxn, a Bengaluru-based platform that tracks startup funding. By 2025, venture capital had fallen to less than $3 billion. Most global edtech funding comes from U.S. venture firms, Tracxn's data shows.

The founder pool shrank alongside the money. Rest of World, reporting on the collapse, cites figures of 645 companies launched in 2025 against almost 10,500 in 2020. High customer acquisition costs, long institutional sales cycles and low retention rates tied to murky learning outcomes have all weighed on the sector, according to an analysis by Loot Drop, a database of more than 1,700 startup closures.

HolonIQ, a research firm that advises governments and investors on education, wrote in a February 6 post that money is moving toward AI tools and training platforms that help companies hire, cut costs and teach workers new skills. "Investors concentrated capital in AI-enabled products, workforce-aligned platforms, and K-12 operations solutions that address cost or operational pressures, staffing challenges, and learning support at scale," the firm wrote.

Loot Drop's analysis reached a similar place: corporate workforce development, professional certification prep and specialized skill acquisition for high-income careers look more promising than K-12 general education. "The winners will likely be vertical-specific tools that integrate into existing workflows rather than platforms trying to replace entire educational institutions," it concluded.

What the money is buying

Two funding stories, one pattern. Capital is concentrating in AI products sold to businesses, and it is leaving consumer-facing education behind. That is not a moral judgment about which products help people. It is a statement about where returns look defensible to the people writing the cheques.

The edtech shakeout has been brutal for some of the sector's biggest names. Byju's, once the world's most valuable education startup at $22 billion, collapsed under a financial crisis and aggressive sales tactics for expensive courses. Nigerian startup Edukoya shut down in 2025, citing weak profitability and waning investor support. In China, the government's "double reduction" policy in July 2021 crushed the K-12 online education sector almost overnight. Yuanfudao, once valued at $15.5 billion and one of only two global edtech decacorns alongside Byju's, ended its core tutoring services and pivoted to AI hardware, launching "learning machines." It is now among the top six players in China's AI learning hardware market, alongside rival Zuoyebang.

A cautionary note on AI outputs

Not every AI-adjacent business story this year has been a valuation headline. MeetingTV, a video conferencing and webinar startup, sued Palo Alto Networks after its newly acquired Koi Security unit published a blog linking the company to a Chinese corporate espionage operation. The complaint, reported by The Register on 2 July, alleges Koi used an LLM to generate the threat report, that the AI system hallucinated findings about MeetingTV, and that the security shop published them as facts in a December 30 blog.

The lawsuit accuses Koi of "reckless publication of an AI-driven cybersecurity report that falsely accused Plaintiff MeetingTV Inc. of criminal conduct including operating core infrastructure for a well-funded Chinese criminal organization running a large-scale malware and corporate espionage campaign." A Palo Alto Networks spokesperson told The Register the company is aware of the lawsuit regarding a report published before the acquisition, and said it expects the dispute to be resolved through the legal process.

MeetingTV founder and CEO Michael Robertson told The Register he learned about the report only when providers started blocking his company's domains. "If people on the internet are blocked from reaching your company, then that's a death sentence," he said. "Plus all the LLMs now say we're working with Chinese cyber criminals. How will that ever get removed?"

That is a different kind of AI risk from a down round, and it lands on a much smaller company. The funding numbers get the headlines. The liability questions are still being written into court filings.