Lovable has received a cease-and-desist letter from Figma, warning the Swedish AI startup to stop using the phrase “Dev Mode” in its products, claiming it infringes on their intellectual property.
Figma, a California-based web design platform valued at around $10bn with backers such as Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, called out Lovable over its use of the term “Dev Mode” on its platform.
On Tuesday, Lovable cofounder Anton Osika published what appeared to be a cease-and-desist letter from Figma’s lawyers, demanding the Swedish startup stop using the term. It read: “Rename your tool, and remove all references to our mark from your website, marketing materials, and other public-facing content.”
The term, shorthand for “developer mode”, is widely used in the tech world and typically refers to enhanced settings that allow a given user to test, debug and optimise their software program. The phrase has been used formally and informally among tech companies and programmers alike for many years.
Figma, however, has apparently trademarked the term as part of its three-tiered product offering: design mode, prototype mode and developer mode.
The letter added: “We’d like to resolve this amicably so that we can each get back to building great products for our customers.”
Outlining the situation on Linkedin, Osika wrote: “For context, we launched ’Dev Mode’ to Lovable a few weeks ago that lets you edit the code of your Lovable project. Dev Mode is a common feature name used by companies like Wix, Atlassian, Figma, Shopify and many more.”
At the time of writing, the post had received over 2,000 reactions, 70 reposts and 750 comments, many suggesting alternative names for Lovable’s feature, such as Dev Mood, Devable Mode or Dev Lov.
Sifted has reached out to Lovable and Figma for a comment.
Lovable has developed an AI tool that enables people without coding skills to create websites within minutes. It has mainly created headlines because of its impressive growth journey so far. Within three months, the Swedish startup has $17m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), 30k paying customers and 25k apps being built on the platform daily.
That kind of ARR growth is unusual. Apart from Norwegian food delivery startup Oda — which hit €30m ARR in just three months in 2016 — these numbers make Lovable one of the fastest-growing startups in European history, according to the company.
Data from top SaaS vendors on Ramp shows that Lovable is also able to compete with US startups. In April, Lovable tops the list of biggest percentage change in new customer count ahead of companies like Codeium, Anthropic, Canva and Cursor.
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