Who is winning the "Vibe coding" race?
A data-driven review of Cursor, Lovable, Bolt and Windsurf
👋 Hi, it’s Palle Broe and welcome to Rule of Thumb, my weekly newsletter exploring the startup and tech world providing tangible advice and insights from the worlds best operators and startups
Vibe coding (god I hate that name) is all the hype these days - but which player is ahead? I did a review of the below 4 leading vibe code startups to find out.
Lovable
Anysphere (Cursor)
StackBlitz (Bolt)
Codeium (Windsurf)
Methodology
I looked specifically at “native” vibe code startups with AI coding as their sole or primary focus. Companies like Vercel, Anthropic and Replit were therefore not considered although they have great products. Data is pulled from Harmonic and public available sources - treat it as directionally correct.
The 4 leading vibe coding startups
So far 4 startups have emerged as leaders within the “AI coding agent” vertical. They are all reporting growth and traction numbers unlike anyone has ever seen before - growing more than $1M ARR per week. Naturally the worlds best VCs are flocking to get into them hoping to get a piece of the pie.
Their founding stories are slightly different with StackBlitz (Bolt) being the oldest founded in 2017 but only truly finding PMF with the release of the Anthropic 3.5 Sonnet. Anysphere (Cursor) and Codeium (Windsurf) have been riding the LLM waves since the early 2020s and Lovable, the new kid on the block, was founded in Stockholm, Sweden in 2023.
There is also a stark difference in the capitalization of the startups. Lovable has raised a modest $22.5M and Codeium has raised more than $246M (or 10x more). With the pace of this category expect these numbers to change quickly.
ARR Growth
I have seen a lot of crazy growth in my life. Nothing beats that of the AI coding applications right now. While Cursor is ahead in absolute terms it will be interesting to see if Bolt and Lovable can keep their steep growth rates going - potentially overtake Cursor as the fastest applications to reach $100M ARR.
StackBlitz (Bolt.new) from 0 - $40M in 4 months
Lovable from 0 - $20M in 3 months
Anysphere (Cursor) from 0 - $100M in 21 months
Codeium (Windsurf) from 0 - $30M in 24 Months
As a point of comparison Wiz is the fastest SaaS company to reach $100M ARR. They did it in 18 months.
Customer Growth & Usage
Fueling the rapid ARR growth is obviously a crazy amount of user love and usage. Cursor is currently leading with more than 3M active monthly users and 360K paying users with an additional 30K enterprise customers. These numbers are bonkers. The rest of the startups are quickly catching up with Bolt at 1M active users, Windsurf at 700K and Lovable at 500K.
The big question here is what retention is looking like. Are people using it a few times and then churning or are they able to keep them as happy active customers?
Website & SoMe traction
Right now Cursor appears to be the front runner for these kind of applications - they also have the most monthly website visits at 13M/month. What is more interesting to me is just how fast Lovable appears to be growing with an astounding 10M/month website visits. They also appear to be leading the SoMe game specifically for LinkedIn where they are far outpacing the other more well funded startups.
Revenue & Revenue per Employees
All of the startups are generating real revenue. Cursor have reached $100M and anecdotally getting very close to $150M ARR. Codeium has cross the $40M mark and StackBlitz and Lovable has crossed the $20M.
Even more impressive is the employee count making these revenue number a reality:
Lovable: 20
StackBlitz: 28
Cursor: 30
Codeium: 146
Jason M. Lemkin used to argue that $250K/employee is a good revenue/employee number for pre-IPO scale-ups. With the below AI startups the avg. number is $1.3M 😲:
Anysphere: $3.3M
Lovable: $1M+
StackBlitz: $700K
Codeium: $300K
Hope you enjoyed this deep-dive. Please don’t forget to subscribe for more similar deep-dives in the future!
Thanks for the run down - much appreciated 🌞
Love the comparison!