Lovable's $6.6B round: Accel, Khosla said to join

Accel, a U.S. venture firm, is part of the round, the sources told CNBC. The outlet noted this detail had not been reported before. Khosla Ventures is also participating, one source said. On 16 December, CNBC reported that Lovable, Accel and Khosla Ventures had been approached for comment but had not responded by publication.

Forbes had put the number lower. In November it reported the round would value the company at "around" $6 billion, a figure CNBC noted in its own piece.

Founded in 2023, Lovable reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue in November, just under a year after it first hit $1 million in ARR. The company said 100,000 projects were being built on its platform every day when it announced those figures.

Lovable's platform uses models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic to turn text prompts into apps and websites, so users do not need to write code. It is based in Stockholm and is opening offices in Boston and San Francisco. Accel is not a new name on the cap table: it backed Lovable's previous round, the July raise that brought in $200 million and included Creandum, Klarna founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski and Synthesia founder Victor Riparbelli.

The wider vibe coding market has drawn serious money this year. In the U.S., Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November, according to CNBC. Replit reached a $3 billion valuation in September after picking up $250 million, and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.

The Lovable numbers land in a funding market that has clearly split in two. Headlines this week alone included cyber startup Island at a $6.4 billion valuation and AI agent company Instinct closing a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation, per the funding roundups for 24 and 28 September. AI infrastructure and enterprise AI are pulling capital; other categories are not.

The clearest counter-example is edtech. Global investment in the sector peaked at $16.7 billion in 2021 and fell to less than $3 billion by 2025, according to Tracxn data cited by Rest of World in an April report. The number of new companies launched in the space dropped from almost 10,500 in 2020 to 645 in 2025, the same piece said.

"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," research firm HolonIQ wrote in a 6 February post cited by Rest of World.

The pattern is not confined to education. Insurance is attracting automation money of its own. Outmarket, which uses AI to handle paperwork for commercial insurance brokers, announced a $34.5 million Series B on 28 September led by SignalFire, four months after a $17 million Series A, TechCrunch reported. The round valued the company at $355 million, according to a person familiar with the investment, and Outmarket said it has more than 300 insurance agencies as customers.

Where the money goes also depends on who is willing to vouch for it. TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, running 13 to 15 October at Moscone West in San Francisco, has now named 20 judges for its Startup Battlefield 200 competition, with five more to come before finalists compete for a $100,000 equity-free prize.

One thread running through all of it is verification. A lawsuit filed by MeetingTV against Palo Alto Networks unit Koi Security, reported by The Register on 2 July, alleges that a Koi threat report published on 30 December was generated with an LLM that hallucinated findings linking the video startup to Chinese espionage. Koi's blog was later edited to remove references to MeetingTV's Zoomcorder product. Palo Alto Networks told The Register it was aware of the lawsuit and believed Koi's research reflected its commitment to exposing threats. MeetingTV founder Michael Robertson told the outlet that providers including Verizon and Palo Alto Networks still block his company. Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Koi in April.

For Lovable, the immediate question is what $6.6 billion buys. The company has not confirmed the round, the valuation or the investor list. CNBC's sources asked to remain anonymous because the information is private.