"Vibe coding" - you say what you want and the machine writes the code - sounds like a social media meme. Swedish startup Lovable has turned it into a business. Its annual revenue run rate has passed 600 million dollars (around 526 million euros), co-founder Fabian Hedin said at the HumanX summit in Amsterdam. In June the same figure was around 500 million dollars.

The small print is worth reading. An "annual revenue run rate" isn't revenue earned over a year - it's current monthly revenue multiplied by twelve. A handy number for a summit stage, especially for a fast-growing company. Hedin claims people at two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies use the product, and he lists Microsoft, Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom among its clients. Lovable later had to clarify that Hedin meant people who work at those companies.

Hedin says Lovable isn't just another coding tool. "You can use these tools [like Codex or Claude Code] to get code. The difference is that Lovable doesn't give you code. The result is a product, and more and more often a business," he said. Apps built on the platform together draw almost a billion visits a month - an order of magnitude more than Lovable itself, according to him.

Investors are answering with ever bigger cheques. In December Lovable raised 300 million dollars from Menlo Ventures and CapitalG at a valuation of 6.6 billion dollars. In August came 400 million dollars from Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund, at a valuation of 13.3 billion dollars (around 11.7 billion euros). In total more than 700 million dollars in two rounds, eight months apart - and the valuation doubled in between.

Europe has spent years watching its most promising startups leave for America, so Lovable is a rare story growing out of Stockholm with a European fund on board. For the Balkans the question is different: if you no longer need a whole team of programmers to build an app, is this an opportunity for local IT companies that live off outsourcing - or the beginning of the end of their model?