TL;DR
Likeable CEO Anton Osika says Europe’s AI gap is about confidence, not talent, as his Stockholm startup is valued at $500 million.
Favorite CEO Anton Osika European AI startups say there is no shortage of talentthey have a lack of confidence. In a post on Weekend X, Osika claimed that founders have been repeatedly told to move to San Francisco if they want to build a serious AI company, but the real obstacle has never been the engineering pipeline.
“Talent was never a problem,“Osika wrote.”It was the trust you could build from here.“
The comments carry weight because Lovable has become one of the strongest data points for the counterargument. The Stockholm-based coding platform Vibe surpassed $500 million in annual revenue this month.making it one of the fastest growing software companies in history with just 146 employees. The company has raised $653 million in four funding rounds following a $330 million Series B led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, reaching a valuation north of $6 billion.
Osika said millions of people have used Lovable to turn ideas into products and businesses, most of them in Europe, though the US remains the company’s biggest market. He pointed to the engineers who chose to return to Europe for what he called their most important work.
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Labor force data support the anecdote. Analysis by Revelio Labs, which tracks migration using public immigration records, found that by the end of 2024, more tech workers had moved in the opposite direction from the US to Europe, reversing a long-standing pattern. The share of US workers moving overseas has increased from three percent to six percent since 2021, with IT consulting roles showing the sharpest growth.
The change has been fueled by tighter US immigration regulations and screening of work visas, which have made the path to a career in America more uncertain for foreign nationals. Balderton Capital’s ‘Built in Europe’ campaign backed by over 100 founders from Revolut, Mistral, Wayve and Lovablelaunched earlier this month in five European cities with a clear message: talent, capital and ambition are already on this side of the Atlantic.
Not everyone agrees with the solution to the problem. Speaking in Stockholm in May, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham said aspiring founders still need to spend time in Silicon Valley for the hustle and bustle of investors and chance meetings. He suggested Stockholm could become the “Silicon Valley of Europe” but said the original still offered something no European center could replicate.
Osika admitted that a piece was still missing. He wrote that Europe needs a regional AI infrastructure to match the demand and talent that already exists, citing the continent’s dependence on US cloud providers and limited local computing capacity.
The debate is no longer hypothetical. Lovable, ElevenLabs in London, and Mistral in Paris built companies valued in the billions without ever moving to the Bay Area. Whether these patterns represent a permanent shift or a collection of temporary outliers is a question that European technology is now answering in real time.
