Revolutionary AI App Builder Anything Raises $11M, Aims to Be the Shopify of Vibe Coding Market
The meteoric rise of vibe coding, a technology that utilizes AI to build apps and websites through natural language prompts, has captured the attention of both investors and entrepreneurs alike.
In July alone, Swedish startup Lovable achieved an impressive annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $100 million, just eight months after its inception. The company aims to close the year at a staggering $250 million ARR and envisions reaching a billion dollars within the next 12 months. Replit announced earlier this month that its ARR had skyrocketed from $2.8 million to an impressive $150 million in less than a year, highlighting the sector’s remarkable growth.
The success of these companies has spawned a multitude of competitors, many experiencing rapid growth. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder and general partner at VC firm Footwork, remarked that this is one of those spaces where every company seems to be thriving.
However, despite their impressive growth, Lovable, Replit, and other vibe coding startups face a notable challenge, asserts Basu Trivedi: they excel at developing prototypes but fall short in enabling users to launch production-ready software. According to Basu Trivedi, these companies often fail to provide the necessary infrastructure for nontechnical users to launch functional products.
To address this issue, a new AI app called Anything was launched a month ago, offering all the tools – from databases to storage and payment functionality – required to run businesses on the web or to publish vibe-coded creations in the App Store. Within two weeks, Anything had achieved an annualized run rate of $2 million.
Though the vibe coding market is becoming increasingly crowded, the company’s growth rate has been so impressive that Basu Trivedi decided to invest in it. On Monday, Anything announced a successful $11 million financing round at a $100 million valuation, led by Footwork, with additional backing from Uncork, Bessemer, and M13.
Founded by former Google colleagues Dhruv Amin and Marcus Lowe, Anything is designed to help nontechnical individuals generate complete web and mobile applications. Amin believes that users have already leveraged Anything to create fully functional apps available in the App Store, including a habit tracker, a CPR training course, and a hairstyle “try-on” app. Some of these apps are even generating revenue.
According to Amin, the key advantage of using Anything is that users don’t have to spend time figuring out how to set up and connect essential tools to their vibe-coded prototype. The idea of developing a comprehensive AI-assisted app builder came to Amin and Lowe a little under a year ago. They started working together in 2021, and their initial offering was a bootstrapped development marketplace that combined AI coding tools with human developers.
However, the rise of LLMs made it clear that generative AI could soon deliver apps faster and at lower costs than their marketplace model. So, in 2023, they shut down that business and started working on developing an AI-powered app-building tool. They even managed to secure pre-seed and seed funding from Uncork and Bessemer Venture Partners along the way.
Amin and Lowe noticed that most competitive tools, including Lovable and StackBlitz’s Bolt, rely on the third-party database Supabase. In an effort to differentiate itself, Anything AI decided to build all its infrastructure in-house. This development took time but may prove worthwhile as Anything is not the only startup in this market. It’s not even the only one making a bet that offering all the back-end tools can be a significant growth driver. Other startups building substantial parts of their own infrastructure include Mocha and Rork, with the latter on track to hit $10 million in ARR by the end of the year.
Despite intense competition, Basu Trivedi remains optimistic, stating that there appears to be enough demand for different types of app-building products.
