The AI startup Lovable recently leased space for its Boston office in the One Lincoln building near South Station. Scott Kirsner
Two of the AI industry’s buzziest and most valuable startups have quietly planted their flags in the Boston area: Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude, and Lovable, which makes an AI tool that can create custom software from instructions typed in plain English.
Anthropic is headquartered in San Francisco, and it has been hiring employees at a shared WeWork office in Cambridge’s Central Square. Lovable is based in Stockholm, and it signed a short-term lease at One Lincoln, an office tower in downtown Boston, according to several real estate industry sources.
Lovable announced it would be opening a Boston office in November of last year, but didn’t specify where. The company is hiring an office manager, sales executives and engineers.
Many of Lovable’s Boston employees previously worked at Klaviyo, a digital marketing company that went public in 2023. This includes Ryan Meadows, formerly a senior sales executive at Klaviyo, who is now Lovable’s chief revenue officer. Another local employee who joined Lovable in November is Kim Walsh, who is also an investor in Boston Legacy FC, the city’s new women’s pro soccer team.
While Lovable focuses exclusively on creating software, Anthropic offers Claude Code, which competes with Lovable, and a general-purpose AI chatbot as well, that the company describes as a “thinking partner.”
Anthropic is currently raising $10 billion in additional funding that would value it at $350 billion, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. (In December, Lovable raised $330 million in a funding round that valued the Swedish company at $6.6 billion.)
According to LinkedIn, Anthropic already has more than 25 employees based in Massachusetts — several of them recently minted PhDs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard — and most of them are focused on technology development.
One of the Cambridge site’s senior leaders is Richard Tibbetts, a former vice president at the data analytics company Tableau, now part of Salesforce. His LinkedIn profile says he is “leading two development teams within the Anthropic Product Frontiers organization, focusing on developing new kinds of user interfaces and agentic capabilities.”
Over the years, many tech companies headquartered elsewhere have set up outposts in the Boston area to access talent — especially recent college grads — or to provide a home for companies that they acquire. Some of those outposts have grown quite large, including Amazon and Google, which both employ several thousand people in Massachusetts.
Roy Hirshland, real estate brokerage firm Savills’ North America chairman, wonders whether Anthropic’s and Lovable’s small Boston offices are merely footholds to recruit local graduates or if they’ll eventually grow to the scale of Amazon’s or Google’s presence in the city.
Both companies, while headquartered elsewhere, have raised capital from investors in Massachusetts. Fidelity Investments, which often invests in promising private companies, has invested in Anthropic and HubSpot Ventures has backed Lovable.