Lovable CTO：SaaS 的未来是智能体可用的应用

Lovable is well known as an AI-powered platform to build applications. But ironically, it is now moving towards a future where fewer and fewer people will be using conventional apps. That is, of course, because of the growing impact of agents.

In a recent blog post, Lovable outlined a vision for “a digital brain for your team connecting your daily tools.”

Or as Lovable CTO Fabian Hedin put it in an interview with Latent Space, “you can get to a place where you’re using one entry point to all the work that you’re doing.”

Diagram by Latent Space based on an internal diagram shown to us by Lovable.

To be clear, Lovable still wants to be the tool you use to build apps — but increasingly, it will also enable you to build what Hedin calls “capabilities.” Lovable defines a capability as a useful part of an application that an agent can call directly; bypassing the need for a human user to open the app.

Lovable can turn a published application into agent-accessible capabilities by exposing selected functions from the app as tools through a hosted MCP server. The result is essentially one application with two interfaces: a traditional human UI and a new agent interface that can be used from ChatGPT, Claude and other MCP-compatible AI clients.

Diagram supplied by Lovable

This is how fast an AI business evolves

This shift towards capabilities is the latest evolution from Lovable, in an already fast-moving 3 years in business.

Lovable emerged from GPT Engineer, an open source coding tool that launched in 2023, initially focusing on prototyping. In November 2024, it became a commercial product and the following month, it was rebranded as Lovable.

By that point, they’d begun to notice some of its users building production apps on Lovable — including products that had become real businesses.

“We started seeing people on the platform building not only a prototype, and not only an MVP [Minimum Viable Product], but the actual thing — an actual product that serves real customers,” Hedin said.

Next, Lovable noticed its users creating internal software, in some cases to support a public-facing app and in other cases as an internal app built for an enterprise company.

“People started creating not only software to enable a business, in terms of a customer-facing product, but also the operations behind the company,” Hedin said.

He means tools like a CRM, an admin panel, or a customer-support console.

From app builder to agent platform

So in less than three years, Lovable has become an all-round software creation and hosting company, which means it’s swimming in the same waters as the likes of Vercel and Cloudflare. That said, Lovable is more focused on AI-generated software than infrastructure. But we are seeing crossover in these markets — for example, Vercel’s v0 allows you to generate an app from natural language, just like Lovable.

Also just like the black triangle and orange cloud companies, Lovable has expanded into agentic workflows.

Lovable connectors, which let you use external tools.

This rapid product evolution has been accompanied by strong user and revenue growth. According to a tweet from Deedy Das, a partner at lead investor Menlo Ventures, the company has surpassed a $500 million annualized revenue run rate, with more than 60 million projects created and over 900 million monthly visits to Lovable-built apps. Lovable also says employees at nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500 have used the platform.

Unsurprisingly, Menlo Ventures is doubling down on its investment. It led Lovable’s $400 million Series C this month, alongside the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, valuing the company at $13.3 billion.

Hedin attributes the pace of change to a combination of Lovable’s innovation and the rapidly improving state of LLMs.

“Every few months, we introduce new capabilities at the application layer, while the large language models also continue improving. Those two things compound.”

Lovable’s model of a company brain

The concept of a digital brain for an organization, for Lovable, essentially means a single interface where you can access many different tools and workflows.

“It should have as much context as possible about you, your company and the world around you,” said Hedin. “Then it needs the capabilities to perform both general tasks and actions that are specific to your organization.”

Ultimately, he added, the goal is that “everything that you’re building can be reused in an agentic way.”

Diagram supplied by Lovable

In a sense, then, applications are becoming a collection of capabilities that users will increasingly access through an organizational agent — instead of, or in addition to, the actual application.

“Our job as a platform is to ensure that all these separate capabilities are connected through one agent — not that you have to build a different agent for every task,” said Hedin.

As an example, Hedin mentioned an internal application they use at Lovable.

“We built this internal tool to help us grant credits to users [via] our support team, and help manage our platform in different ways. Those capabilities are now available [internally] through the Lovable agent.”

Lovable also wants this company brain to work asynchronously. Its agent can schedule itself to resume a task later — for example to check a deployment or to monitor a recurring process — then return the result to the same conversation.

The competition

Lovable isn’t the only company pursuing a “company brain” vision. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch recently introduced its internal agent, called @𝚟. “Every day-to-day job at Vercel now involves @𝚟,” Rauch tweeted. “It’s growing exponentially both in daily interactions and token use.”

Hedin acknowledged that Vercel and other AI companies are building towards a similar vision, but he thinks Lovable’s “wedge” is “being the best place to build the capabilities that agents need.” In other words, Lovable’s focus is on helping their users build the capabilities that a company brain will need.

“Orchestrating these capabilities is the easy part,” Hedin said. “Making sure they are well connected, built correctly and reliable is the hard part.”

He also hinted at why they’re using the word ‘brain’ to describe this shift, rather than just ‘agent’.

“I’m careful about using the word ‘agent.’ It suggests something like an employee performing a task, which is an easy way to think about it. But underneath, it is really about connecting the right context and capabilities.”

Security and connecting to external capabilities

Perhaps the biggest challenge with the agents and capabilities paradigm is security. For instance, if one of your employees creates an app with Lovable that connects to the company Slack, you want to ensure that user doesn’t inadvertently expose their personal messages, or any other confidential information, to the company brain.

Connectors are Lovable’s method of connecting to external tools and services. Hedin said the platform must account for a “kind of permissioning graph” to maintain security and privacy.

As described in a technical article on Lovable’s blog, one connector type, which Lovable calls an “app user connector,” preserves each user’s identity and source-system permissions. Credentials are stored server-side in encrypted form and handled by Lovable’s connector gateway, rather than being exposed to the generated application; the app instead presents a short-lived key bound to the relevant user.

Diagram supplied by Lovable

“We separate the connection to external systems from the application code being written,” is how Hedin put it. “The application interfaces with the Lovable platform, but the application itself never gets access to those credentials.”

The future of SaaS

So Lovable is moving to a future where a company brain uses capabilities derived from the apps its users build. That begs the question: what will happen to SaaS apps?

Hedin reiterated that people will increasingly interact with software through an AI layer — the company brain concept.

“People are not going to have as many tabs open in different tools as they have historically. That experience is going to consolidate, but the vertical capabilities those tools provide will remain valuable.”

He recognizes that some traditional SaaS products may “fight” this trend, by sticking with their traditional apps and not adapting, but he says Lovable wants to become a platform for building capabilities.

“We want to build this open platform that anyone can connect to, anyone can use,” he said.

Hedin ended with some advice for SaaS companies, whether existing ones or apps that might emerge on the Lovable platform.

“I think SaaS businesses are going to have to focus more on providing the shovel for AI to use their capabilities.”