Lovable just raised $200M at a $1.8B valuation led by Accel

What better way to know it’s the weekend than getting your weekly dose of updates on everything that happened in AI? We’ve been cooking up a ton of plans behind the scenes with the team, and we can’t wait to spill the beans. But we’re clearly not the only team working to make the most of H2 2025. This week alone, we could barely keep up with all the AI brands announcing new funding, it takes an insane work rate to pull that off. The one that made us say, “Nope, we’ve gotta tell this story,” was Lovable’s big announcement. You might’ve seen the founder’s tweet earlier in the week; if not, no worries—we’ve got you!

We hope you enjoy reading this one as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Eight months ago, Stockholm-based Lovable opened its virtual doors with a bold promise: let anyone build an app or website just by describing what they want in plain language. That bet is paying off in a big way. The company has just landed a $200 million Series A round led by Accel, valuing the young startup at about $1.8 billion.

Lovable’s growth curve looks almost cartoonish. It already counts more than 2.3 million active users, 180 000 paying subscribers and roughly $75 million in annual recurring revenue, all reached in under seven months. Those users have spun up around 10 million projects on the platform, mostly quick prototypes that can later be polished by professional developers. What’s just as eye-catching is how lean the operation is: only 45 full-time employees keep the lights on and the servers humming. The new cash comes on top of a $15 million pre-Series A raised in February and brings aboard an A-list crowd of repeat investors and angels, including the CEOs of Klarna and Remote and Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

CEO Anton Osika says the fresh funding will help Lovable move beyond hobby projects and prototypes into full-blown, production-grade apps. Early signs are promising: one Brazilian ed-tech company claims it made $3 million within 48 hours of launching an app built entirely on Lovable.

OpenAI just gave ChatGPT a big upgrade. The new “agent mode” lets the chatbot jump out of the chat box and actually do work for you, from sorting your calendar to whipping up a slide deck. The tool stitches together skills from earlier experiments like Operator (for browsing and button-pushing) and Deep Research (for summarizing big piles of info) and wraps them inside the familiar ChatGPT interface. It starts rolling out today for Pro, Plus, and Team users; just pick agent mode from the drop-down and tell it what you need.

Under the hood, the agent taps apps you already use, like Gmail or GitHub through “connectors,” and even opens a virtual terminal to run code or call APIs on its own. OpenAI claims the model behind it is miles ahead of previous versions, scoring twice as high as older GPTs on intense benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam and FrontierMath. Because an AI that can roam the web and run commands raises obvious red flags, OpenAI built in safety rails. Every prompt gets screened for bio-related risks, and the agent’s long-term memory is switched off (at least for now) to block sneaky data grabs through prompt injection. Real-world performance is still an open question, earlier agents from other players have stumbled on complex tasks, but if OpenAI’s confidence holds up, many of your computer chores may soon be one chat away.

Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot has taken a hard turn from headline-making rants to cosplay romance. This week, “Super Grok” subscribers on X can summon new built-in companions for $30 a month, including Ani, an anime girl in a corset and fishnets, and Bad Rudy, a trash-talking red-panda-fox hybrid.

Just two days later, xAI posted a job opening for a “Fullstack Engineer, Waifus,” asking candidates to help “create AI-powered anime girls for people to fall in love with.” The listing claims the role supports xAI’s lofty mission to “understand the universe,” yet it boils down to shipping more virtual girlfriends. The quick pivot from Grok’s recent antisemitic alter-ego “MechaHitler” to playful waifus shows how fast xAI is experimenting in public. Fans get novelty characters and stylized voices; critics see another step toward blurring lines between entertainment and intimacy in AI apps, especially after competitor Character.AI’s legal troubles. Whether these pixelated partners stay harmless fun or spiral into fresh controversies will depend on how well xAI can balance novelty with safety this time around.

Netflix is folding generative AI into its shows and films, and the company says the results are already on-screen. On this week’s earnings call, co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed that a new Argentine sci-fi series, “El Eternauta,” contains the streamer’s first AI-generated final footage: a collapsing-building shot that its in-house Eyeline Studios finished ten times faster, and for less money, than old-school visual-effects work. Sarandos described AI as “better tools for real people,” noting that teams now use it for storyboards, shot planning, and time-saving VFX tweaks that once demanded blockbuster budgets.

Co-CEO Greg Peters said the tech is spreading across Netflix’s stack. GenAI already powers parts of search and personalization, and an interactive ad format driven by the same underlying models is penciled in for the back half of 2025. The move builds on an AI-assisted search feature Netflix rolled out earlier this year.

The business picture looks solid alongside the tech news: second-quarter revenue climbed 16 percent year over year to $11.08 billion, while profit hit $3.13 billion. Viewers clocked more than 95 billion hours of streaming in the first half of 2025, and one-third of that came from non-English titles, a stat Netflix says AI can help localize and recommend even better. For creators, the takeaway is clear. AI isn’t replacing filmmakers; it’s cutting the grunt work and widening the palette. For viewers, it could mean bigger-looking shows made on smaller budgets, and maybe ads that finally feel personal without being creepy. 

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