Who Could Make a Move for Lovable?
Will anyone make a move to buy Lovable?
Any offer probably needs to clear $20bn, a premium to the $13.3bn Series C in August, which is a high bar not many strategics can or are willing to meet. An IPO is an increasingly realistic route, but Lovable is still in play, and SpaceX agreeing to buy Cursor for $60bn makes a takeover of the category leader for non-engineers more plausible.
Google looks like the strongest fit. Sundar Pichai named AI coding as an area Google must improve in July, AI Studio is being rebuilt as a prompt-to-app builder, and Lovable already runs on Gemini. The businesses built on Lovable mostly run on Google Workspace and find customers through Google Ads, so owning it puts Google where those businesses start. It's also an existing investor through CapitalG, and paid $32bn for Wiz this year.
Microsoft and Salesforce
Microsoft and Salesforce have spent years trying to get business users to build their own software, which is what Lovable has accomplished. It is now selling enterprises on retiring SaaS contracts, which eats directly into their licence fees, so owning it would be partly defensive. If Lovable raises another up round, Salesforce may be out of scope, although it bought Slack for $28bn in 2021.
OpenAI and Anthropic
OpenAI and Anthropic both want to own the non-engineer half of coding, and owning Lovable would take them from writing the code to running it in production. And for Lovable, one of its biggest gaps is lacking a model of its own, resulting in higher inference costs, which this would solve.