Lovable's $6.6B round and the two other AI funding stories of the week

The round is Lovable's third of 2025. CNBC reported on 16 December that US venture firm Accel is taking part, alongside Khosla Ventures. Both sources spoke anonymously because the deal is private. Neither Lovable nor the two investors had responded to CNBC's request for comment by the time the story ran.

Forbes had reported in November that the round would value the company at "around" $6 billion. CNBC's sources put the figure higher.

Lovable was founded in 2023 and is based in Stockholm. It reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue in November, less than a year after first hitting $1 million in ARR. Its July round raised $200 million from Accel, Creandum, Klarna founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski and Synthesia founder Victor Riparbelli. When the company announced the November ARR figures, it said 100,000 projects were being built on its platform every day. It is opening offices in Boston and San Francisco. The platform runs on models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic, and lets users build apps and websites from text prompts.

Lovable is not the only company in its category attracting large cheques. Anysphere, which makes the coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November, per CNBC. Replit reached a $3 billion valuation in September after picking up $250 million, and Vercel closed a $300 million round at $9.3 billion.

Where the money is not going

Education looks very different.

Global edtech investment peaked at $16.7 billion in 2021, driven by lockdowns that kept children out of classrooms. By 2025 venture capital had fallen to less than $3 billion, according to Tracxn, a Bengaluru-based platform that tracks startup funding, as reported by Rest of World in April 2026. The founder pool shrank with it: 645 companies launched in 2025, against almost 10,500 in 2020.

The reasons are not mysterious. Loot Drop, a database of more than 1,700 startup closures, points to high customer acquisition costs, long institutional sales cycles and low retention driven by murky learning outcomes. Byju's, once the world's most valuable education startup at $22 billion, collapsed under a financial crisis. Nigerian startup Edukoya shut down in 2025. In China, the "double reduction" policy of July 2021 ended Yuanfudao's core tutoring business and pushed the former $15.5 billion company into AI learning hardware.

"Corporate workforce development, professional certification prep, and specialized skill acquisition for high-income careers are more promising than K-12 general education," Loot Drop's analysis concluded.

HolonIQ, which advises governments and investors on education, wrote in a 6 February post reflecting on 2025 that capital had concentrated in "AI-enabled products, workforce-aligned platforms, and K-12 operations solutions that address cost or operational pressures." That is a narrower, more operational bet than the consumer-scale promises of the pandemic years.

The risk that arrives with the model

A third story from the sector is a warning about how quickly AI-generated output can become an operational fact for other companies.

MeetingTV sued Palo Alto Networks after Koi Security, a threat-intelligence business Palo Alto acquired in April, published a December 30 blog linking the video conferencing startup to a Chinese corporate espionage operation. The Register reported on 2 July 2026 that the complaint alleges Koi used a large language model to generate the report, that the system hallucinated findings about MeetingTV, and that Koi published them as facts. The blog, since silently edited, described MeetingTV's Zoomcorder product as a "public-facing front" for a criminal operation.

The fallout was immediate and practical. Security companies and service providers blocked MeetingTV's domains, labelling them malware and command-and-control infrastructure. Founder and CEO Michael Robertson told The Register that Koi never contacted the company before publishing, and that he learned about the report only from the blocks. "If people on the internet are blocked from reaching your company, then that's a death sentence," he said.

Palo Alto Networks said in a statement that it is aware of the lawsuit, which concerns a report published before the acquisition, and that it believes Koi's research reflects its commitment to identifying threats. The company declined to answer The Register's specific questions about the allegations. The lawsuit claims Koi's case rested on a browser extension, the "Twitter X Video Downloader," that MeetingTV says does not exist.

Three funding and product stories, then, with one thread running through them: the same model capability that investors are paying billions for is also producing output that other businesses have to absorb, dispute and sometimes litigate.