Europe’s AI startups lack confidence, not talent, says Lovable CEO

European founders have long heard the same refrain: if you want to build a serious AI company, you need to move to San Francisco. But Lovable CEO Anton Osika is pushing back, arguing that the real obstacle holding Europe back is not a shortage of engineering talent, but a confidence deficit. In a post on X over the weekend, Osika directly challenged the prevailing narrative, stating that “the talent was never the problem. The belief that you could build from here was.”

Osika’s argument carries significant weight because his own company has become a powerful counterexample. Lovable, a Stockholm-based vibe-coding platform, recently surpassed $500 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) with a lean team of just 146 employees. The company has raised $653 million across four funding rounds, including a $330 million Series B led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, pushing its valuation well beyond $6 billion. According to Osika, millions of users,many of them based in Europe,have used Lovable to transform ideas into products and businesses, though the U. S. remains its largest market. He also highlighted a growing trend of engineers choosing to return to Europe for what they consider their most important work.

Workforce data backs up this anecdotal shift. Analysis from Revelio Labs, which tracks migration through public immigration records, shows that by the end of 2024, more tech workers were moving from the U. S. to Europe than in the opposite direction, reversing a long-standing pattern. The share of American workers switching to jobs abroad has nearly doubled from under three percent in 2021 to almost six percent, with IT consulting roles seeing the most dramatic increase. This trend has been accelerated by tighter U. S. immigration enforcement and increased scrutiny of work visas, making the path to building a career in America more uncertain for foreign nationals.

The message is being amplified by initiatives like Balderton Capital’s “Built in Europe” campaign, which launched across five European cities earlier this month. Backed by over 100 founders from companies like Revolut, Mistral, Wayve, and Lovable itself, the campaign delivers a blunt assertion: the talent, capital, and ambition are already on this side of the Atlantic.

Not everyone is convinced the problem is solved. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, speaking in Stockholm in May, argued that ambitious founders should still spend time in Silicon Valley for its unmatched density of investors and serendipitous meetings. While he suggested Stockholm could become “the Silicon Valley of Europe,” he maintained that the original still offers something no European hub can replicate.

Osika acknowledges one critical missing piece: regional AI infrastructure. He noted that Europe remains heavily dependent on U. S. cloud providers and lacks domestic compute capacity to match its growing demand and talent pool. That gap, he argues, must be addressed for the continent to truly compete.

The debate is no longer theoretical. Companies like Lovable, ElevenLabs in London, and Mistral in Paris have all built billion-dollar valuations without relocating to the Bay Area. Whether these successes represent a permanent shift or a temporary cluster of outliers is the question European tech is now answering in real time.