Lovable exec says 'big boys and girls' like OpenAI and Anthropic worry her more than other vibe coding startups

• Lovable's Elena Verna sees Big Tech firms as the main competitors, not smaller vibe coding startups.
• This is because the distribution power of these labs is unparalleled, she said.
• Lovable's ARR increased by 30% in a single month, BI reported.

Other vibe coding players are not the biggest competition, says one Lovable exec.

"I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world," Lovable's head of growth Elena Verna said on a Sunday episode of the "20VC" podcast. "So, OpenAIs, Anthropics, Googles, Apples, more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from sideways."

This is because the distribution power of these tech giants and frontier labs in the market is unparalleled, she said.

Stockholm-based Lovable was valued at $6.6 billion in a December funding round led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures. It competes with other vibe coding startups like Cursor, Replit, and Emergent, as well as far bigger and better-funded players, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, that make their own AI coding tools.

Verna, who joined the startup last May after a series of advisory and head of growth stints at various startups, said that in a world where products are becoming increasingly similar, distribution and growth are winning strategies.

"Whoever has the best distribution that is earned, that is competitively defensible, that is sustainable, that is predictable, is going to be the winner in the market," she said. "I worry about the companies that have that figured out."

Verna's comments about competition follow a period of brutal comparisons between products made by vibe coding startups and Anthropic's Claude Code.

After Anthropic released its latest model, Opus 4.6, founders and developers said on X that they are ditching their expensive Cursor and Lovable subscriptions for Claude Code.

Still, Lovable is going strong.

The Swedish startup's annual recurring revenue has surged by more than 30%, from $300 million to $400 million in a single month, Business Insider reported. ARR, a key metric to gauge startup performance, refers to the predictable revenue a company expects to generate over a year.

Lovable's chief revenue officer, Ryan Meadows, told Business Insider that the company plans to more than double its head count by the end of 2026, from 146 to 350 employees.

He added that Lovable, which specializes in making coding user-friendly, sees at least 200,000 new vibe coding projects created each day.