How this AI agent startup hit $1.8 billion in 8 months

Plus: GPT-5 is coming in August, the most useful agents out there today, and more

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

Actually, Building AI Agents is a (top-tier) newsletter. But the balancing exercise stuff is a good observation as well.

In today’s issue…

  • Lovable becomes a billion dollar agent startup

  • 🚀 The Building AI Agents Community is growing fast

  • GitHub’s new vibe coding agent

  • OpenAI to release GPT-5 in August?

  • The most useful AI agents…that actually exist

…and more

🔍 SPOTLIGHT

Lovable hit $100 million annual revenue in 8 months | Source: Lovable

If a product can get 180,000 people to shell out a total of $100 million dollars for it, it must be pretty Lovable.

Just 8 months after launch, startup Lovable has hit a $1.8 billion valuation with its new $200 million Series A funding round. Last Wednesday, the company announced that it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), something that took OpenAI nearly two years.

So what kind of amazing product does a company have to provide to grow this quickly? Obviously, this wouldn’t be Building AI Agents if the answer wasn’t “an AI agent”—but the details are what make it most interesting.

Lovable’s core offering is a coding agent that allows users to use natural language to describe a website or app they want built, and watch AI turn it into a (usually) fully-functional app. Along with other rival vibe coding tools like Replit agent, the value proposition of Lovable is that it enables idea guys—people who constantly find themselves brainstorming products they think could change the world, but lack the technical skills to build them—to actually turn their dreams into reality. Cursor and Windsurf recently achieved eye-popping growth by selling coding agents of their own to slightly more technical builders.

That’s the path to riches with AI agents then, right? Build a product that helps wannabe creators realize their ideas with code? In some cases, yes, but it’s not the only one. While writing this newsletter, I’ve reported on other agent startups that have exploded in value while targeting very different niches. Legal startup Casetext grew from a $100 million to $650 million valuation in less than 6 months by selling to law firms. Sierra pulled off similar growth by building customer service agents for large enterprises. Meteoric growth, then, doesn’t depend on making coding agents or selling directly to consumers.

So what’s the common denominator? It’s helping people solve major pain points that involve language. Large language models are called that for a reason—they can’t drive a truck, cook a burger, direct a movie, or fill a prescription. But give them a workflow to automate that involves text—like writing code, parsing legal documents, or chatting with customers—and they start to shine. Apply that power to a domain like these that gives millions of consumers and businesses headaches every day, and you have the recipe for an AI agent unicorn. I won’t say that it’s easy—building a billion-dollar company will never be. But there are countless areas where language-based workflows eat up peoples’ time, and we’ve barely begun to scratch their surface with AI agents.

All you need to do is find your niche.

 🎉 MILESTONE UNLOCKED

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