Lovable valued at $6.6 billion as AI funding splits into haves and have-nots

The sources, who asked to remain anonymous while discussing private information, told CNBC that U.S. venture firm Accel participated in the round. CNBC reported the Accel involvement on 16 December, saying it had not been previously reported. Khosla Ventures, another U.S. investor, is also in the round, one source said.

Lovable, Accel and Khosla Ventures were all approached for comment by CNBC and had not responded when the article went live. That means the $6.6 billion figure and the investor list rest on anonymous sourcing, not on a company statement or a filing. Forbes reported in November that the round would value Lovable at "around" $6 billion.

What Lovable actually sells

Lovable's platform lets users build apps and websites from text prompts, without needing to understand code. Under the hood it uses AI models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic.

The company is based in Stockholm and is opening offices in Boston and San Francisco, according to CNBC. Founded in 2023, Lovable reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue in November. That came just under a year after it first hit $1 million in ARR. The company also said at the time that 100,000 projects were being built on its platform every day. Those are the company's own numbers, reported by CNBC, and they are the kind of metric that private startups choose to disclose.

Its July round raised $200 million. Investors then included Accel, Creandum, Klarna founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski and Synthesia founder Victor Riparbelli. The new round would be Lovable's third of 2025.

The sector is not short of money

Vibe coding has pulled in large cheques on both sides of the Atlantic. Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. Replit reached a $3 billion price tag in September after picking up $250 million. Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.

"Venture capital flows reflected a shift from volume to intention," HolonIQ wrote in a February 6 post on its website, reflecting back on 2025.

That line comes from an analysis by HolonIQ, a research firm that advises governments and investors on education sectors, and it was quoted by Rest of World in a 23 April 2026 piece on the edtech collapse. The same logic shows up in the numbers elsewhere. 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 in the sector had fallen to less than $3 billion.

Rest of World also reported that the pool of edtech founders has dried up: 645 companies launched in 2025, against almost 10,500 in 2020. The reasons it lists are mundane and familiar. High customer acquisition costs, long institutional sales cycles and low retention rates tied to murky learning outcomes, according to an analysis by Loot Drop, a database of more than 1,700 startup closures.

Where the money goes instead

The pattern is not that venture funding has disappeared. It is that the criteria have narrowed. HolonIQ said investors concentrated capital in AI-enabled products, workforce-aligned platforms and K-12 operations tools that address cost or operational pressures, staffing challenges and learning support at scale.

Loot Drop's analysis put it more bluntly. Corporate workforce development, professional certification prep and specialised skill acquisition for high-income careers are more promising than K-12 general education, it concluded, adding that the likely winners are vertical-specific tools that plug into existing workflows rather than platforms trying to replace entire educational institutions.

Lovable sits on the winning side of that split, at least for now. It is a developer tool sold to people who want to ship software faster, and its revenue curve is the argument investors are buying. Whether $6.6 billion is the right price for that argument is a question the round itself does not answer.