Anton Osika is the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, the Stockholm company whose AI app builder became one of the fastest-growing software products in history. A physicist turned engineer turned founder, Osika took an open-source side project from GitHub curiosity to a company valued at $6.6 billion in under three years.
His path runs against the standard Silicon Valley script: no Stanford, no Y Combinator, no move to San Francisco. Lovable was built and scaled from Sweden, and Osika has argued publicly that Europe can produce category-defining AI companies without relocating.
From particle physics to startups
Osika trained as a physicist and did research at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, before deciding that shipping products beat writing papers. He moved into Stockholm's startup scene as an early engineer at Sana Labs, the AI learning company, and later co-founded Depict.ai, which built product-discovery technology for e-commerce.
Those years gave him a specific conviction: most software is plumbing that smart systems should write themselves. That idea sat dormant until large language models made it testable.
GPT Engineer: the experiment that became a company
In 2023 Osika published GPT Engineer, an open-source tool that took a written specification and attempted to generate an entire codebase. It became one of the most-starred AI repositories on GitHub, collecting tens of thousands of stars in months and proving that demand for full code generation was real.
Rather than keep it a research toy, Osika co-founded Lovable with Fabian Hedin to productize the idea for non-engineers. The hosted platform launched in late 2024 and reached $100 million in annualized revenue within eight months, then crossed $400 million by February 2026, a pace Forbes has documented in detail. Lovable now ranks first overall in our guide to the best AI app builders.
Billionaire on paper, builder in practice
Lovable's $330 million December 2025 round at a $6.6 billion valuation made Osika and Hedin billionaires, according to Forbes, which estimated each co-founder's stake at roughly 24 percent. By June 2026 the company was reportedly in talks to raise again at a $12 billion valuation.
Fortune quoted Osika describing his end goal: Lovable should be "the last piece of software" a company ever needs to buy, because everything else gets built on demand. It is an audacious claim, and the revenue curve so far has kept skeptics quiet.
What founders can take from his playbook
Osika's arc offers a repeatable lesson: he validated demand in the open before building the business. GPT Engineer's GitHub stars were market research that cost nothing and recruited a community years before a paid product existed.
The second lesson is positioning. Plenty of teams built AI coding tools for developers; Lovable aimed at the far larger population of people with ideas and no ability to code, a market its competitors discounted. The bet on non-engineers is what our app builder testing kept confirming: the product works for people the rest of the category leaves behind.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Anton Osika?
Anton Osika is a Swedish engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI app builder. He previously did research at CERN, worked at Sana Labs, and co-founded Depict.ai.
What is Anton Osika's net worth?
Forbes estimated in December 2025 that Osika's stake in Lovable made him a billionaire, worth about $1.6 billion after the company's $6.6 billion round. Paper valuations shift with each round, so the figure moves with the company.
What did Anton Osika do before Lovable?
He did particle physics research at CERN, joined Stockholm AI company Sana Labs as an early engineer, co-founded e-commerce AI startup Depict.ai, and created the open-source GPT Engineer project that preceded Lovable.
Why is Lovable based in Stockholm?
Osika has said Sweden gives the company access to strong engineering talent with less competition than the Bay Area, and he has been vocal that European founders should not feel obligated to relocate to build large AI companies.