Harry Stebbings: Europe is 'solidified as a block,' Lovable growing $2.5M ARR per week with 85%+ retention

Summary

Harry Stebbings, who manages over $750 million across his fund and media businesses, argues that Europe's startup ecosystem is undergoing a sentiment shift that most American observers are missing — and that the timing has never been better to build there.

Project Europe

Stebbings launched Project Europe as a founder-backing vehicle, initially targeting 25 participants. It hit 150 in three days and has since received 300 to 400 additional requests to join. A legal cap of 250 is the only constraint. His core argument is that European founders have been told for years to relocate to Silicon Valley, and that narrative needs to change at the level of vibes before it changes at the level of capital flows.

On whether national rivalries fracture the European investor base, Stebbings is unequivocal: Europe has solidified as a block. Spanish, Italian, British, and French investors are operating as a unified front, and the US-Europe divide under the current trade environment is accelerating that cohesion rather than fragmenting it. He names Helsing as Europe's answer to Andreessen Horowitz — a defense-tech company that reframes what European ambition looks like.

Lovable

Stebbings was an early investor in Lovable, a Swedish vibe-coding platform, and the numbers he cites are striking. Lovable is growing $2.3 to $2.5 million in ARR per week, with retention above 85% — better than ChatGPT's by his account. He frames that retention figure as the key signal: this is not sugar-high AI revenue. The company's founder, Anton, is his example of the kind of obviously exceptional European founder who historically would have been told to move to the US.

The broader website-builder market he sees as a compounding opportunity — Webflow begat Framer, Framer begat Lovable — with each generation opening a new customer segment. Lovable's positioning, in his framing, follows the same playbook as Nike and Shopify: make the customer the hero. Anyone can build a website.

The SaaS danger zone

Stebbings flags a segment of the market he thinks is being ignored. SaaS companies between $50 million and $200 million ARR, growing in the teens and not yet profitable, are in a structurally dangerous position. They are not attractive PE acquisition targets, and they are not strong enough to IPO. He describes this as a chasm that a lot of companies are going to fall into.

Larger PE-owned assets — he names Anaplan and Copper as examples — face a different problem: bought at peak valuations, without founder-CEOs, and having lost product centricity. Getting back to acquisition price will be a hard slog.

LP market and early-stage pricing

Stebbings raises a concern about endowment funds that he says is not getting enough attention. Trump administration policy changes are forcing endowments to cut private-market allocations, and those institutions are responding by freezing new manager relationships and trimming existing ones. He expects this to materially reduce the number of new fund managers who can raise successfully in 2025.

At the early stage, pricing for clearly great assets is the highest it has ever been. His view is that winning in venture today requires either being a better picker than the market or being capital attractive enough to win a competitive round at a high price — and very few firms can credibly claim both.