Lovable is not just raising money at eye-watering valuations. It’s also quietly building a playbook for absorbing founders from other startups, and its latest move makes that strategy hard to ignore. The Stockholm-based vibe coding platform has acquired the team behind Nalvin, a Swedish AI agent startup that helps businesses automate repetitive workflows. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the structure looks like a classic acqui-hire.
Nalvin was founded by Pontus Gifvas, Fredrik Stockman, and Pascal Chatterjee. The Stockholm-based company, previously called Version Lens, raised a €1.5 million pre-seed round in 2024 from People Ventures, Curiosity, and Pitchdrive. It built an AI agent platform aimed at putting automation to work inside actual business operations, not just demo environments. That’s a crowded space, but the founders clearly impressed Lovable CEO Anton Osika enough to bring them in-house.
Osika has been open about the acquisition strategy. He has posted on X looking for “more great teams and startups to join Lovable,” and this is reportedly the fourth founding team to join the company since it launched. In November last year, Lovable also picked up Molnett, a cloud infrastructure provider. The pattern is consistent: find technical founders with strong instincts, absorb them before a competitor does.
The timing matters. Lovable is reportedly in talks to raise $300 million at a $13.2 billion valuation, which would double its last known valuation of $6.6 billion. That kind of growth trajectory puts enormous pressure on the company to ship fast and stay ahead. Acqui-hiring experienced founders is one way to skip early-stage hiring friction and get people who already understand what it takes to build at speed.
Lovable competes directly with Replit and Cursor, plus the coding tools being pushed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. None of those competitors are sitting still. Replit has its own agent ambitions, and Cursor has built serious developer loyalty. So Lovable’s approach of pulling in founders who think “end to end,” as Osika put it, is a deliberate bet on culture and execution speed over headcount.
For Nalvin’s team, the move makes practical sense too. The problem they were solving at Nalvin, helping companies deploy AI the way their business actually runs, doesn’t get smaller at Lovable. It gets bigger. And for early-stage founders sitting on a pre-seed round, access to Lovable’s scale and resources is a significant step up. Whether this approach keeps delivering as Lovable grows is the real question worth watching.
