- Lovable opened its first London office with 70 people and aims to reach 100 by December.
- Cursor, Anthropic, and OpenAI all expanded into London in 2026, making the hiring market very competitive.
- If Lovable hits 100 in London by December, then that office will be around 22% of the 450-person workforce they’re planning.
Anton Osika says Lovable’s growth is down to his deliberate decision not to move to Silicon Valley, despite investors suggesting it. Today, the Swedish unicorn opened its first London office with 70 people and aims to reach 100 by year-end.
Lovable is a vibe coding platform that lets people build software in plain language. London is its second engineering, product, and design hub, after Stockholm. The team works on AI research, enterprise and growth engineering, forward-deployed engineering, security, infrastructure, design, go-to-market, marketing, people, and finance.
“I’ve always loved London. There’s brilliant talent, ideas, and culture coming out of this city. It’s the reason we brought in Nad Chishtie to lead design from here early on,” Osika wrote in a LinkedIn post.
London’s tough hiring market
Lovable is entering a very crowded market. In June, Cursor announced it would open a London office and grow to around 200 employees across EMEA by year-end, up from 70 to 80. SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor in August.
OpenAI has leased 88,500 sq ft in King’s Cross, and Anthropic is expanding to accommodate around 800 employees. More foreign AI firms are making it increasingly difficult for local startups to recruit.
These are the competitors Lovable is watching. To hit the 100-employee target by 31st December, they’ll need to recruit 30 people over the next nine weeks, i.e., over 3 per week, based on our calculation.
Acquisitions have helped Lovable grow. The company says its London office now includes the team from Radish AI, which it recently acquired to strengthen its agents and infrastructure offering. Lovable also acquired Molnett, a cloud infrastructure startup, in November 2025 and the Nalvin team in July.
Funding behind the hiring strategy
Lovable raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation on 12th August, led by Menlo Ventures and EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund. They’d raised $330 million in Series B in December 2025 and $200 million in Series A in July 2025.
Lovable’s valuation is 27x its $500 million in annualised revenue as reported in June. Cognition was last valued at $26 billion on about $490 million in revenue, at 53x. The
AI code generation market is expected to grow from $ 9.5 billion in 2026 to between $22 billion and $30 billion by 2030. Lovable plans to reach around 450 employees by 2026, with hires in ML, product, infrastructure, and security, and most of the team still based in Stockholm. If London reaches 100 employees, that would be around 22% of the total workforce.
The London opening clearly signals that Lovable doesn’t intend to remain a Stockholm-only company. It’s unclear whether Lovable can hire the requisite number of people to staff the new hub quickly, or whether it will have to go out and acquire the talent it simply can’t hire.
