bilt.me raises $700K pre-seed to turn prompts into mobile apps
Six engineers in Tallinn hit six-figure ARR in a year, then raised $700K from Superhero Capital and the founders of Bolt and Lightyear to turn plain-language prompts into native mobile apps.
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Founded 2025 · Tallinn, Estonia
Tallinn-based bilt.me has raised a $700K (about €615K) pre-seed round led by Helsinki’s Superhero Capital, joined by Bolt founder Markus Villig and Lightyear co-founder Martin Sokk, to scale an AI-native builder that turns plain-language prompts into native iOS and Android apps.
The round was announced on 28 September 2026. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it plays in and the pattern it confirms – one we in Europe should recognise by now.
Six engineers, one Finnish lead
The numbers first. bilt.me raised $700K in pre-seed funding, with Superhero Capital, the Helsinki-based early-stage fund, leading the round. Markus Villig, who founded Bolt in Tallinn, and Martin Sokk, co-founder of the investment platform Lightyear, participated as angels. No valuation was disclosed.
The company says the capital will fund global expansion and further development of the platform’s capabilities. The announcement is deliberately unglamorous: no moonshot language, just more capacity for a product that already sells.
And it does sell. bilt.me reports six figures in annual recurring revenue, with revenue doubling month over month for three consecutive months – company-reported figures, as ever at this stage, but a rare shape for a team that only incorporated a year ago.
From prompt to App Store
Founded in August 2025 by Uku Joost Annus (CEO), Kevin Akkermann and Karl Kiilaspää, bilt.me is a team of six engineers building an AI-native mobile app builder: you describe the app you want in plain language, and the platform generates it, previews it in real time and ships it as a native app to both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
“There are more than a billion websites but only a few million apps: apps are harder to build, so fewer people make them,” Annus said in the announcement. That gap is the whole thesis. “Our bet is that apps, not websites, are where the next generation of businesses gets built.”
Because the existing tooling assumed its users could code, the team ended up building its own rails: Bilt Payments for monetisation, Bilt Cloud for hosting and Bilt Link for distribution. Thousands of users are building on the platform, the company says – roughly 75% consumer apps and 25% private, in-house tools – and its users have already published paid apps on both stores.
A $44.5bn envelope with no label for this corner
Sizing this market honestly requires a caveat: no reliable, dated sizing exists yet for AI-native app builders as their own segment. The nearest credible envelope is low-code development technologies, which Gartner forecasts at $44.5bn worldwide in 2026, growing at roughly 19% a year (forecast cited September 2024). Vibe coding is the consumer-facing edge of that spend, and the edge is where the growth concentrates.
For scale inside our own fundraising data: European pre-seeds announced in the past week include Reply Next’s €400K round led by 4Founders Capital and Duqu’s €1.5M round led by Curiosity VC. bilt.me’s cheque sits between them – small, precise, and raised on revenue rather than on a deck.
The Bolt flywheel spins again
So why does a $700K cheque deserve a headline? Because of who wrote it and where. Estonia has spent twenty years turning exits into angels: Skype alumni seeded the generation that built Wise and Bolt, and now Bolt’s founder and Lightyear’s co-founder are writing first cheques for the AI generation. The flywheel is the story; bilt.me is this week’s proof that it still spins.
The reality is that Europe’s vibe-coding wave has so far been a web story – browser-based builders shipping web apps. The silver lining in bilt.me’s positioning is that the native-mobile lane is far less crowded, and the app stores bring something the browser never did: built-in distribution, payments and a paying-customer default. What we are watching now is whether that becomes a durable moat, and whether month-over-month doubling survives contact with churn once the early-adopter cohort has built its apps.
Watch the Tallinn playbook, then: build revenue with six people, raise small, and let the operators who did it before carry the signal. Europe does not need bigger pre-seeds; it needs more of exactly this shape. Let’s keep the flywheel fed!
