Lovable HIts $500M in ARR, Apple Announces AI Siri

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
Today on the podcast, Lovable has hit a $500 million annual recurring revenue, and their users are building 1 million projects a week. Apple has announced a ton of new features and finally rolled out the AI Apple redone series we've been waiting for. In addition, Apple is turning shortcuts and Safari extensions into natural language and vibe coding, which is really interesting, seeing Apple getting into the space. Perplexity is looking to do a IPO in 2028, that's their target, and they say it doesn't matter on, you know, regardless of whatever's happening with Anthropic or OpenAI and all the other listings, 2028 is when Perplexity is going to IPO. Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity, his company, has cut staff at the same time as OpenAI is planning to IPO, so OpenAI is growing and that one is shrinking. Google's DeepMind is picking 15 European robotic startups for AI, their AI Accelerator program. I also want to tell you about my recent experience vibe coding an iOS app, getting approved on the app store, and kind of the way the whole market has shifted, is this is something I've been focused on and working on for seven years. So the place we're at today, I think has a lot of implications for what we'll see in the future. Out of the gate, we have to talk about Lovable, who is on an absolute tear right now. This is a vibe coding platform. If you haven't used it, you go there, you explain a tool you want to build and it can create it for you. I've built dozens of projects on Lovable, some serious ones, some less serious ones, and ultimately at the end of the day, I've actually had most of the big ones I use ported off of Lovable, and I'm hosting them myself and editing them myself now just because Lovable got too expensive. I was paying $600, $800 a month for the Lovable credits where something like Claude Cowork is subsidized. But Lovable is on an absolute tear right now, and if you're not a developer, this is the number one way I recommend people go and actually build apps. Anything, Base 44, Replit, these are all other great competitors, but Lovable is the one I like the best because they do a really good job with the database integrations and a lot of AI integrations and security audits and SEO audits, and they do a lot of really awesome stuff built in. And because all of that is happening, they just crossed $500 million in annualized revenue. That is $100 million jump since February. They're now seeing, like I mentioned, a million new projects launched every single week. I think there's a lot of people that are using this, founders, designers, salespeople. You just build internal CRMs or HR platforms.
Basically stuff you would have paid for traditional SaaS, but maybe it didn't have all the features you want. I'm gonna be honest, as far as vibe coding goes, I have a bunch of tools that I use, including, by the way, as I'm doing this entire podcast episode, I vibe coded a platform that helps me come up with all of the scripts and all of the stories. It does all of the research, and it puts it all together for me, and I can kind of go through and talk about and look at all of the points about what's happening in the news. So the thing that I love about that, though, is every time I see like, I'm like, oh shoot, it's annoying that this happens or that happens. You don't submit a customer support request, you don't go watch a YouTube video to figure out how to do something or if it's possible. I just go to Claude on the side and I'm like, hey, add a button on the left side of my page here that when I click it, it refreshes all of the, you know, like all of the article descriptions and does XYZ thing and gives a couple more in-detailed pieces of information because I need them for the podcast I'm doing. Like whatever I'm doing, I just tell Claude and it instantly adds it, and then I'm off to the races and I move on with my life. And it is so, so cool, and I think people are really discovering that power because you can do all that with Lovable. So users have created over 50 million projects on Lovable since it was, it started actually in 2023, and it's not even three years old, but this thing is on an absolute tear. In August of 2024, they said that they were going to hit a billion dollars in ARR within 12 months, so they didn't actually do that because they're currently at $500 million run rate. But I mean, their growth curve is incredible, and their timeline was pretty aggressive back then. They didn't actually hit that. But I think we got to give them some flowers for just making such an insane amount of money so quickly, growing so fast. Survey data shows that non-technical users are building production-grade CRMs, inventory systems, and HR platforms, categories that were much, I think, commonly kind of locked behind multi-tier SaaS contracts. This is what I'm seeing a lot of people talking about basically. Okay, Apple is turning shortcuts and Safari extensions into natural language vibe coding. This is really interesting. They had their big WWDC 2026 This is their big developer conference.