Which vibe coding startup is growing the fastest?

The fastest-growing startups in the vibe coding market

Below is a table ranking the startups of this market by annualized growth, measured between two public figures, with the most recent measurements first. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Vibe Coding Market.

Which vibe coding startup is growing the fastest right now?

Emergent is the fastest-growing vibe coding startup among recent measurements: its revenue run-rate went from $10M in August 2025 to ~$120M in July 2026, a 12.0x jump in 11 months.

Put on a yearly footing, that is an annualized pace of about +1,400%, and nobody else with a recent figure comes close. Cursor is second with more than 13.3x in 14 months (more than +820% a year), then Replit (3.5x in 7 months, +760%), Base44 (more than 3.4x in 8 months, more than +520%) and Lovable (more than 8.0x in 15 months, more than +430%).

The first objection is obvious: Cursor's multiple is bigger than Emergent's, so why isn't Cursor first? Because Emergent got its 12.0x in three fewer months. Once both are brought to the same 12-month footing, Emergent's pace is clearly faster. Cursor wins on size by a mile, and we come back to that below.

The bottom of our ranking needs a word too. Windsurf posted the most explosive rate of all, 6.8x in 7 months, but between December 2024 and July 2025, so it sits after the recent measurements. Bolt.new is measured on registered users, since no clean pair of revenue figures six months or more apart is public.

Rank	Startup	Growth observed	Annualized growth	From → to (metric)
1	Emergent	12.0x in 11 months	+1,400%	$10M (Aug 2025) → ~$120M (Jul 2026), revenue run-rate
2	Cursor	>13.3x in 14 months	>+820%	~$300M (Apr 2025) → >$4B (Jun 2026), revenue run-rate
3	Replit	3.5x in 7 months	+760%	$150M (Sep 2025) → ~$525M (Apr 2026), revenue run-rate
4	Base44	>3.4x in 8 months	>+520%	~$59M (Dec 2025) → >$200M (Aug 2026), ARR
5	Lovable	>8.0x in 15 months	>+430%	$75M (Jun 2025) → >$600M (Sep 2026), revenue run-rate
6	Windsurf (older measurement)	6.8x in 7 months	+2,600%	~$12M (Dec 2024) → $82M (Jul 2025), ARR
7	Bolt.new	>1.4x in 9 months	>+57%	~5M (Mar 2025) → >7M (Dec 2025), registered users

Why is everyone suddenly talking about vibe coding startups?

Vibe coding went from a joke on X to one of the biggest money stories in tech in about eighteen months, and the price tags explain why people now want to know who is really growing.

Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in February 2025 to describe building software by describing what you want and letting an AI write the code. By November 2025 Collins had named it its word of the year. The money followed even faster. SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor for $60B in an all-stock deal announced in June 2026, Lovable was valued at $13.3B after a $400M round in August 2026, Cognition reached a $48B valuation in September 2026, Replit raised at $9B in March 2026 and Emergent became a $1.5B unicorn in July 2026, about thirteen months after launch.

Those valuations say a lot about investor appetite and very little about growth, though. Lovable's valuation doubled in eight months and Emergent's rose five-fold in six, but a jump in valuation shows what investors will pay and says nothing about sales. The only fair way to answer the title is to compare two public revenue figures for each company, which is what our ranking does.

How fast is Emergent growing?

Emergent, the prompt-to-app builder run by brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha, multiplied its revenue run-rate by 12.0x in 11 months, from $10M in August 2025 to ~$120M in July 2026.

The $10M came from its investor Together Fund, which described the startup reaching $10M of ARR about two months after launch. The ~$120M came from the CEO, in a TechCrunch interview on July 15, 2026, alongside a $130M Series C at a $1.5B valuation. Both describe an annualized sales pace rather than a full year of booked revenue, and the first was labelled ARR while the second is run-rate revenue, so the comparison carries a little definitional noise.

What's striking is the shape of that growth. Emergent said in February 2026 that it had passed $100M of ARR eight months after launch, with about 150,000 paying customers. By July it reported ~$120M and more than 200,000 paying customers. On the company's own statements, almost all of the 12.0x happened in the first six months, and the run-rate added roughly $20M over the following five, if the two figures are defined the same way (we can't fully check that). So Emergent leads our ranking on the strength of a spectacular first half-year, and its latest stretch looks far calmer.

Who pays is also unusual. Emergent says about 70% of its users had no coding experience and nearly 40% are small businesses building CRMs, ERPs and logistics tools, with North America and Europe each bringing about a third of revenue and India only 8% to 9%. Most of its roughly 200 staff work in Bengaluru, while the company is headquartered in San Francisco.

Is Cursor growing faster than Emergent?

No, Cursor is growing slower than Emergent in percentage terms, but it is adding far more money, and that gap is enormous.

Cursor's revenue run-rate went from ~$300M in April 2025 to more than $4B in June 2026, so more than 13.3x in 14 months. Emergent's 12.0x took 11 months. Annualized, that gives more than +820% for Cursor against about +1,400% for Emergent, which is why Emergent ranks first and Cursor second.

The dollar picture flips completely. By our calculation, Cursor added more than $3.7B of annualized revenue over its window, against ~$110M for Emergent, more than thirty times as much. Growing over 13x from a base of ~$300M is a much harder feat than growing 12x from $10M, and Cursor is the only startup in our ranking that multiplied a nine-figure base by more than ten.

How did Cursor get to $4 billion in revenue so fast?

Cursor got to more than $4B of run-rate revenue by doubling roughly every few months for over a year, mostly on the back of paying developers and then large companies.

The public milestones line up neatly. About $300M in April 2025, $500M in June 2025, $1B in November 2025, above $2B by April 2026 according to TechCrunch, and more than $4B in June 2026 according to Forbes. That last doubling looks almost too quick, around two months, and the two reports may not measure exactly the same thing, so we treat the June figure as a run-rate claim rather than as audited sales.

Then SpaceX bought it. The $60B all-stock deal for Anysphere, Cursor's parent, was announced in June 2026 and closed in August 2026, and investors told TechCrunch that Cursor sold partly because it was badly short of computing power. SpaceX later reported $608M of recognized Cursor revenue for August 14 to September 30, 2026. That is a different, shorter accounting period after the acquisition, so we don't use it in the ranking, but at least it comes from SpaceX's own accounts rather than from a run-rate claim.

Is Replit growing faster than Lovable?

Yes, Replit is growing faster than Lovable in our ranking, with +760% against more than +430%, but Lovable is the bigger business and the Replit number rests on an outside estimate.

Replit itself announced $150M of annualized revenue in September 2025. The research firm Sacra then estimated ~$525M in April 2026, which makes 3.5x in 7 months. Lovable went from $75M in June 2025 to more than $600M in September 2026, more than 8.0x in 15 months. Lovable's multiple is bigger, but it was spread over twice as much time, and the annualized rate rewards Replit's shorter, steeper climb.

Two caveats deserve a sentence each. Replit's latest point is a third-party estimate, so we rate it low confidence, and Replit moved to usage-based pricing for its agent, which makes monthly revenue jumpier. On money added per month, we calculate ~$54M for Replit against more than $35M for Lovable, so Replit's edge holds on that measure too over the two windows measured.

How fast is Lovable growing now?

Lovable is still growing fast, but at a steadier, more linear pace than its early hype suggests: more than 8.0x in 15 months, from $75M in June 2025 to more than $600M in September 2026.

Its trajectory is the best documented in the market. About $100M of ARR in July 2025, eight months after launch, about $500M announced in June 2026, and more than $600M when co-founder Fabian Hedin spoke at the HumanX summit in Amsterdam in September 2026. Between July 2025 and June 2026 Lovable added roughly $36M of run-rate a month (our calculation), and between June and September 2026 roughly $33M a month.

That steadiness is the interesting part. A company adding about the same number of dollars every month sees its percentage growth fall mechanically: by our calculation, the June-to-September 2026 stretch alone works out to roughly +100% a year, far below the more than +430% over the full window. Lovable is turning into a big, steady business, and its claims about enterprise use point the same way. Hedin said people at two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies use it, which Lovable later clarified means use, not necessarily paying contracts.

How fast is Base44 growing since Wix bought it?

Base44, the Israeli app builder Wix bought in June 2025, is growing very fast: more than 3.4x in 8 months, from ~$59M of ARR in December 2025 to more than $200M in August 2026.

That is an annualized pace of more than +520%, enough for fourth place, ahead of Lovable. Both figures cover the Base44 product alone, not Wix group revenue, and the acquisition predates both, so none of this growth was bought. The window is only eight months, though, so the annualized pace may not last.

The path is steep and fairly regular. Wix's year-end shareholder update gave about $59M, founder Maor Shlomo passed $100M in March 2026, $150M in May and more than $200M in August, five months after the $100M mark. For a product Wix acquired for about $80M plus earn-outs, that is a remarkable return. The catch was margins. Wix told investors Base44's gross margin was near break-even early in 2026 and should reach about 60% in the second half, helped by Base1, Base44's own model built to cut inference costs.

Which vibe coding startups doubled their revenue in a year?

Every vibe coding startup we can measure on revenue did much better than double: the slowest of them, Lovable, still grew more than 8.0x in 15 months.

A simpler way to see it is the time each company needed to double, calculated from the observed multiple and window. Emergent doubled about every 3.1 months, and Lovable, the slowest of the five recent revenue measurements, at most every 5.0 months. Windsurf's older figures imply a doubling every 2.5 months or so, between December 2024 and July 2025. Bolt.new is the only one that didn't double, but its figures are registered users, not revenue.

Rank	Startup	Growth observed	Doubling time (our calculation)
1	Emergent	12.0x in 11 months	~3.1 months
2	Cursor	>13.3x in 14 months	3.8 months or less
3	Replit	3.5x in 7 months	~3.9 months
4	Base44	>3.4x in 8 months	4.5 months or less
5	Lovable	>8.0x in 15 months	5.0 months or less
6	Windsurf (Dec 2024 to Jul 2025)	6.8x in 7 months	~2.5 months
7	Bolt.new (users)	>1.4x in 9 months	18.5 months or less

How long did it take vibe coding startups to hit $100M ARR?

The fastest vibe coding startups reached $100M of ARR in about eight months.

Lovable and Emergent hit that mark at almost exactly the same age. Lovable announced $100M of ARR in July 2025, eight months after launch, and Emergent passed $100M in February 2026, also eight months after launch. Replit took a different road: after years as a coding platform for students, it said it went from about $10M to $100M of ARR in roughly nine months, after releasing its Agent in September 2024. Base44 got there in March 2026, roughly nine months after Wix bought it. Cursor crossed $100M around January 2025, close to two years after its 2023 launch, and then went much further than anyone else.

So the stopwatch to $100M keeps shrinking, but the later sprint matters more. Lovable and Emergent shared the same eight-month start, and since then Lovable has gone past $600M while Emergent sits at ~$120M.

Are the biggest vibe coding startups still growing fast?

Yes, and that is probably the most unusual fact about this market: Cursor, by far the largest startup in our ranking, still grew more than 13.3x in 14 months.

Usually growth rates collapse as companies get big. Here, Cursor at more than $4B and Lovable at more than $600M still post annualized rates of more than +820% and more than +430%. Cursor is the only startup in our ranking above $1B, and by our calculation it produced about three-quarters of all the run-rate added by the five recently measured revenue companies combined.

Rank	Startup	From → to	Run-rate added (our calculation)	Added per month (our calculation)
1	Emergent	$10M → ~$120M	~$110M	~$10M
2	Cursor	~$300M → >$4B	>$3.7B	>$260M
3	Replit	$150M → ~$525M	~$375M	~$54M
4	Base44	~$59M → >$200M	>$141M	>$18M
5	Lovable	$75M → >$600M	>$525M	>$35M
6	Windsurf (Dec 2024 to Jul 2025)	~$12M → $82M	~$70M	~$10M

Is vibe coding growth slowing down?

For the prompt-to-app builders, it is slowing in percentage terms, even if the dollars keep coming in.

Lovable's recent stretch, from about $500M in June 2026 to more than $600M in September, works out to roughly +100% a year by our calculation. Emergent's run-rate moved from more than $100M in February 2026 to ~$120M in July, on the company's own figures. Base44 added about $50M between May and August 2026, after adding about $50M in the two months before that. None of these companies is shrinking, but the 10x-in-a-few-months phase seems to be behind them.

We also have an earlier warning to set against these numbers. In 2025, a Barclays note reported by Business Insider found that web traffic at two leading vibe coding sites had fallen by roughly 40% and 64% from their spring peaks. Revenue kept climbing anyway, which suggests the paying base was stickier than the curious visitors. Cursor is the clear exception to the slowdown, at least through June 2026.

What happened to Windsurf?

Windsurf grew extremely fast, 6.8x in 7 months, but between December 2024 and July 2025, and then it stopped existing as a standalone company, which is why it sits sixth.

Its ARR went from ~$12M at the end of 2024, a Sacra estimate, to $82M in July 2025, the figure Cognition gave when it bought the business. That is an annualized rate of +2,600%, higher than anyone in our ranking, but measured more than a year ago, so we rank it after the recent measurements and never describe it as growing fastest today.

The ending was chaotic. A roughly $3B sale to OpenAI fell apart in July 2025, Google then paid $2.4B to license Windsurf's technology and hire its CEO Varun Mohan, and Cognition bought what remained a few days later. Since then Windsurf's revenue is mixed into Cognition's, so there is no newer standalone Windsurf figure to compare.

How fast is Cognition growing since it bought Windsurf?

Cognition says its revenue run-rate roughly doubled in four months, to ~$1B in September 2026, but that window is too short for us to rank it.

According to TechCrunch, Cognition was at $492M of run-rate when it raised money in May 2026, and Bloomberg reported ~$1B on September 25, 2026, a few weeks after a $2B round at a $48B valuation. The older $73M figure for Devin alone, from June 2025, excluded Windsurf, so comparing it with today's combined company would mostly measure an acquisition. That leaves two comparable points only four months apart, under our six-month minimum, so Cognition gets no rank and no growth rate of ours.

What we can say is that Cognition is now one of the largest companies in this space, with clients like Goldman Sachs, Citi and NASA, and that The Information reported a possible $800M of cash burn this year. That is a lot of money to spend on staying in the race.

What happened to Bolt.new's growth?

Bolt.new is still growing, but slowly on the only clean public measure we have: registered users rose more than 1.4x in 9 months, from ~5M in March 2025 to more than 7M in December 2025.

That is more than +57% annualized, last in our ranking, and it measures sign-ups, not paying customers or revenue. The surprise is that Bolt.new was one of the original rockets. StackBlitz launched it in October 2024, Sacra estimated about $40M of ARR by March 2025, and Business Insider described how the company had nearly run out of money just before. The problem for us is that those early financial milestones fall less than six months apart, and no later revenue figure has been made public, so we can't build a defensible revenue pair.

Bolt.new may well be growing faster in dollars than its user count suggests. We simply can't show it, and we don't rank what we can't measure.

Which part of vibe coding is growing fastest?

Prompt-to-app builders, the tools that turn a plain-English request into a working app, hold our #1 and four of the five revenue-ranked spots among recent measurements.

Emergent, Replit, Base44 and Lovable all sit in that segment, with annualized rates between more than +430% and about +1,400%. The AI-native development environments, which help developers write code faster, have one recent entry, Cursor, at more than +820%, plus Windsurf in the older group. Autonomous coding agents such as Cognition, Factory and Cline make big claims but lack two public revenue figures at least six months apart, so we quote them without ranking them. Sacra estimated Factory at $60M of run-rate in March 2026 against $5M at the end of 2025, only three months earlier, and Factory itself claimed its monthly revenue doubled for six months. Cline was estimated at ~$5M of ARR in August 2025 and said its installations grew from 1M to 5M between March 2025 and January 2026.

The segment split shows a real tension. App builders grow faster in percentage terms, while developer tools capture far more money, since Cursor alone is bigger than all the recently measured app builders combined.

Rank	Startup	Segment	Annualized growth
1	Emergent	Prompt-to-app platform	+1,400%
2	Cursor	AI-native development environment	>+820%
3	Replit	Prompt-to-app platform and coding agent	+760%
4	Base44	Prompt-to-app platform	>+520%
5	Lovable	Prompt-to-app platform	>+430%
6	Windsurf (older measurement)	AI-native development environment	+2,600%
7	Bolt.new (users)	Prompt-to-app platform	>+57%
NR	Cline	Autonomous coding agents	Not ranked
NR	Cognition	Autonomous coding agents and AI IDE	Not ranked
NR	Factory	Autonomous coding agents	Not ranked

Are people who can't code driving the vibe coding boom?

Yes, much of the growth at the app builders comes from people who have never written code, and that is exactly why their curves look so steep.

Emergent says about 70% of its users had no prior coding experience and nearly 40% are small businesses, like trucking companies tracking shipments or property managers building internal tools. Replit is pushing its Agent toward sales, marketing and operations teams, not just engineers. Lovable says apps built on its platform receive nearly a billion visits a month, an order of magnitude more than Lovable's own site.

Cursor sits on the other side of that line. Its customers are professional developers and the companies that employ them, which explains why its growth comes in much bigger cheques. So the two biggest growth stories in this market are actually selling to two quite different crowds.

Which countries produce the fastest-growing vibe coding startups?

The United States produces most of them, including our #1, but Europe and Israel each have a serious contender.

Emergent, Cursor, Replit, Windsurf and Bolt.new are all US companies. Emergent is the odd one, headquartered in San Francisco but built mostly in Bengaluru by Indian founders, which is why the Indian press often calls it an Indian startup. Sweden's Lovable, at more than $600M of run-rate, is the biggest vibe coding startup outside the US in our ranking, and Israel's Base44 ranks fourth with more than 3.4x in 8 months.

That gives Europe a rare top-tier software contender in a hot AI category, and Lovable's $13.3B valuation makes it one of the most valuable startups in Europe. Asia's role so far shows up mostly in talent and engineering, through Emergent's Bengaluru team.

Can you trust vibe coding startups' revenue numbers?

Mostly as a sales pace, much less as audited revenue, and in this market that difference is big.

Almost every figure in our ranking is a run-rate or ARR: a recent month of sales multiplied by twelve. That works for subscriptions but less well when customers pay per use, as they increasingly do with agents, because one strong month can inflate the annual number. Replit's latest point is a Sacra estimate rather than a company statement, Windsurf's starting figure is an estimate too, and Base44 is the only one whose figures partly come from a listed company's shareholder report, Wix's.

Margins are the other blind spot. Wix said Base44 was near break-even on gross margin early in 2026, Sacra put Bolt.new at roughly 40% in May 2025, while Sacra estimated Replit's gross margin at about 85%. Most of these companies pay model makers like Anthropic and OpenAI for every request, so a dollar of vibe coding revenue can be worth much less than a dollar of classic software revenue. The good news is that SpaceX's accounts now show $608M of recognized Cursor revenue in about seven weeks, which is hard to square with a run-rate that was badly inflated.

Are Claude Code and Codex growing faster than vibe coding startups?

We leave them out of the ranking because they belong to established AI labs, but Claude Code at least is growing at startup speed with a much bigger base.

When Anthropic raised $30B in February 2026, it said Claude Code's run-rate had passed $2.5B and that business subscriptions to it had quadrupled since the start of the year. For comparison only, that put Claude Code far above any of the app builders in our ranking.

That creates an awkward dependency. Lovable, Replit and the other app builders run largely on models from the same labs that now compete with them directly, and Cursor's sale to SpaceX was partly about getting access to computing power. The fastest-growing startups in this market are racing companies that also sell them their main ingredient.

So which vibe coding startup is really growing the fastest?

Emergent, and the answer holds: among startups with recent public figures, it grew fastest, 12.0x in 11 months, from $10M in August 2025 to ~$120M in July 2026.

The claim is true with two honest limits. First, most of Emergent's growth came in its first six months, and its latest figures look much calmer. Second, Cursor is the bigger story in dollars, with more than 13.3x in 14 months from a ~$300M base, adding more than $3.7B of run-rate by our calculation. Replit, Base44 and Lovable follow, all growing several times over in a year, while Windsurf's faster rate belongs to 2024-2025 and Bolt.new can only be measured on users.

So if the question is which vibe coding startup grew fastest in percentage terms over the last year, the answer is Emergent. If the question is which one is changing the size of the market, it's Cursor, and it isn't close.