Depict, Anton Osika’s precursor to Lovable

Anton Osika’s journey started at Depict.ai, a company he co-founded to bring product recommendations to ecommerce using computer vision and AI. Depict raised around $20 million from top-tier investors like Initialized, EQT Ventures, Y Combinator, and Tiger Global. But while building Depict, Anton started experimenting with something more radical—an AI coding agent. In mid-2023, he released an open-source side project called GPT Engineer, designed to turn plain English into full applications. It quietly exploded on GitHub, racking up tens of thousands of stars in a matter of weeks. That success didn’t just hint at product-market fit—it screamed it.

Anton left Depict shortly after and teamed up again with his former colleague Fabian Hedin. Together they launched Lovable in late 2023, taking the core insight behind GPT Engineer and building a polished, commercial product around it. Lovable wasn’t just another code assistant—it was a full platform for AI-native software creation. You type your idea, and Lovable turns it into an app, complete with Stripe payments, Supabase backend, GitHub integration, and working code in minutes. From idea to MVP in a single prompt.

Growth was absurd. Within two months, they hit $10 million in ARR. By month seven, they crossed $75 million. They did it with a team of just 15 people and became a unicorn in July 2025 after raising a $200 million Series A led by Accel. What started as an open-source experiment turned into one of Europe’s fastest-scaling startups ever.