Lovable CEO says Europe’s AI startups have a confidence problem, not a talent problem

TL;DR

Lovable CEO Anton Osika says Europe’s AI gap is about confidence, not talent, as his Stockholm startup hits $500M ARR.

Lovable CEO Anton Osika says European AI startups do not have a talent shortage, they have a confidence deficit. In a post on X over the weekend, Osika argued that founders were repeatedly told to move to San Francisco if they wanted to build a serious AI company, but that the real barrier was never the engineering pipeline.

“The talent was never the problem,” Osika wrote. “The belief that you could build from here was.”

The comments carry weight because Lovable has become one of the strongest data points for the counter-argument. The Stockholm-based vibe-coding platform surpassed $500 million in annualised revenue this month, making it one of the fastest-growing software companies in history with just 146 employees. The company has raised $653 million across four funding rounds, reaching a valuation north of six billion dollars after a $330 million Series B led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures.

Osika said millions of people have used Lovable to turn ideas into products and businesses, with many based in Europe, though the United States remains the company’s largest market. He pointed to engineers choosing to return to Europe for what he called their most important work.

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Workforce data supports the anecdote. Analysis by Revelio Labs, which tracks migration using public immigration records, found that by the end of 2024, more tech workers were moving from the US to Europe than in the opposite direction, reversing a long-standing pattern. The share of US workers switching to jobs abroad has risen from under three percent to nearly six percent since 2021, with IT consulting roles showing the sharpest increase.

The shift has been reinforced by tighter US immigration enforcement and increased scrutiny of work visas, which have made the path to building careers in America more uncertain for foreign nationals. Balderton Capital’s “Built in Europe” campaign, backed by more than 100 founders from Revolut, Mistral, Wayve, and Lovable itself, launched across five European cities earlier this month with a blunt message: the talent, the capital, and the ambition are already on this side of the Atlantic.

Not everyone agrees the problem is solved. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, speaking in Stockholm in May, said ambitious founders should still spend time in Silicon Valley for its density of investors and serendipitous meetings. He suggested Stockholm could become “the Silicon Valley of Europe” but maintained the original still offers something no European hub replicates.

Osika acknowledged one piece is still missing. He wrote that Europe needs regional AI infrastructure to match the demand and talent already present, a reference to the continent’s dependence on US cloud providers and its limited domestic compute capacity.

The debate is no longer hypothetical. Lovable, ElevenLabs in London, and Mistral in Paris have all built companies valued in the billions without relocating to the Bay Area. Whether those examples represent a permanent shift or a temporary cluster of outliers is the question that European tech is now answering in real time.