The Swedish startup Lovable has confirmed it raised another 400 million dollars (around 368 million euros) in a funding round led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund, at an estimated valuation of 13.3 billion dollars. In December the same company raised 330 million at a valuation of 6.6 billion. So in about eight months, the company's price has doubled.

What changed in those eight months? Annualised revenue reached 500 million dollars in June. That is a real figure and it is not small - for a company selling software that writes software from short instructions in plain language. The platform hosts 60 million projects and draws 900 million visits a month. But a valuation of 13.3 billion is twenty-six times the revenue. Investors are not paying for the current state of things, but for the belief that next year will be better still.

What is worth noting from here, from the Balkans, is different from the figure itself. Lovable is a European company, Swedish, and among the first that the European tech ecosystem calls its own after many years in which every big exit ended up in California. The round is also backed by a fund created precisely to keep companies like this in Europe. The question no press release answers is how long a company with that kind of valuation stays European before it gets an offer that does not get refused.

The dependency sitting underneath the number

Lovable is also building its own AI model alongside other people's, and in June it signed a multi-year contract with Google Cloud with a fivefold increase in consumption. That is the carefully phrased version of something simpler: the infrastructure under the European unicorn is held by an American company. The firm also invests in other European startups, among them the Danish Atech, which makes software for designing hardware on the same principle.

Twenty-six times revenue is a price that requires the market to keep growing in the same direction. If artificial intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible, and anyone with it can assemble an application without an intermediary - then the question is not whether Lovable is worth 13 billion, but what exactly it will charge for once the thing it sells is built into everything.