Lovable announced on September 18, 2026 that it acquired Sutro, the company behind the SLang programming language and a platform for generating production-ready backends. Sutro founder Tomas Halgas and three Sutro engineers are joining Lovable, with Halgas set to lead the company's technical evangelism.
The deal brings a language, a compiler, and a backend platform built over five years into a company that has spent 2026 raising capital and signing enterprise partnerships. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Who Is Coming Over
Halgas founded Sutro and will take on a role that Lovable said continues the work that drove Sutro: "making how the technology actually works understandable to the people building with it."
Three Sutro engineers are joining alongside him: Max Gfeller, Tony Zhan, and Hirad Arshadi.
Lovable said the Sutro team spent five years building a language, compiler, and backend platform that made application behavior and rules explicit. The company described Sutro's engineering as built for security and reliability.
Lovable said the acquisition reflects a shared conviction that people should be able to trust the software they build to run their businesses while the platform carries more underlying complexity. In its announcement, Lovable wrote that as more people build and ship software, "understanding it has to be as effortless as building it," and that once anyone can put software into production, its reliability and trust have to match the experience of building it.
What SLang Actually Does
Sutro's website markets its product as proper backends built on a zero-infra approach, and describes SLang as concisely defining and deploying production-grade backends. The site states the team has more than 20 years of combined experience on code-generation engines.
Sutro's SLang documentation describes the language's purpose as defining entire backends, including entities, logic, and security, without boilerplate or complex syntax. SLang is designed to be intuitive for humans and AI alike, according to that documentation.
The documentation lays out six core constructs. Entities are persisted database records and relationships. Schemas are reusable non-persisted structured types. Actions are typed business logic functions. Triggers cover HTTP endpoints, queues, cron jobs, and events. Security spans subjects, identity fields, groups, roles, and permissions. Modules provide built-in capabilities such as AI and HTTP calls.
Sutro's API documentation states the service supports generation, hosting, and editing of production-ready backends. A backend can be constructed from a single prompt processed by Sutro's AI agent or assembled manually through API calls. The result is an API server with a downloadable OpenAPI document. Once published, the API is reachable at an address of the form {applicationId}.app.withsutro.com.
A worked example in the documentation shows a short prompt requesting a to-do tracking service producing an OpenAPI specification with user and to-do records and CRUD operations.
Sutro's wider documentation set covers Sutro Studio for creating and editing backends, a command-line interface for creating, previewing, validating, and publishing SLang backends, and a web console for managing projects, applications, and resources. It also documents member and builder authentication based on JSON Web Tokens and mutual TLS, and explains how Sutro-generated apps resolve authenticated subjects and evaluate SLang auth rules.
Sutro offered three generation paths: prompt-to-backend, prompt-to-full-stack, and Figma-to-code. It distributed an official SLang skill for AI coding agents such as Claude Code through its SutroOrg GitHub repository, giving agents knowledge of the language's syntax and semantics.
Sutro stated on its website that SLang uses 12 times less code than competitors, that using Sutro is 97% cheaper than using Supabase, and that complete backends can be generated in under two minutes. Those figures are Sutro's own claims.
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A Busy Stretch for Lovable
The Sutro deal follows a run of announcements from Lovable. On August 12, 2026, the company said it raised $400 million in Series C funding at a $13.3 billion valuation. Menlo Ventures led the round, and the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT co-led it. Returning investors included Accel, CapitalG, and Salesforce Ventures.
In that same August 12 post, Lovable said apps built on its platform see over 900 million visits every month. It said it planned to grow to roughly 450 team members in 2026, hiring most heavily in machine learning, product, infrastructure, and security roles, and that it would keep its center of gravity in Stockholm while expanding in London, Boston, San Francisco, and New York.
Three days before the Sutro news, on September 15, 2026, Lovable announced a partnership with Salesforce. The partnership connects apps built with Lovable to Salesforce in four ways. One is Headless 360, which exposes Salesforce capabilities through APIs and MCP servers. Another is mentioning @Lovable in Slack channels to have apps built from a conversation. A third is shared Slack code channels where several people shape one build. The fourth is agents that teams can install into Slack workspaces as bots. Lovable said all four connection methods were available at the time of the announcement.
Lovable also said people have created more than 70 million projects with Lovable since November 2024.
The Sutro acquisition is not Lovable's first. The company previously acquired Molnett, a deal its blog index dates to November 25, 2025. That acquisition expanded Lovable's platform team.
The Pitch Behind the Purchase
Sutro's public materials emphasize removing infrastructure work from backend development. The zero-infra framing on its website sits alongside the claim that complete backends can be generated in under two minutes, a figure the company presents as a product characteristic rather than an audited benchmark.
The language itself is positioned around explicitness. Entities, schemas, actions, triggers, security, and modules are the six constructs a developer or an AI agent works with, and the documentation presents that set as enough to define an entire backend without boilerplate.
For AI coding agents, Sutro's GitHub repository distributed an official SLang skill, with Claude Code named as an example. The skill gives agents knowledge of the language's syntax and semantics, a detail that matters as more code is written by agents rather than people.
Lovable's framing of the deal leans on that theme. The company said the acquisition reflects a shared conviction about trusting the software that runs businesses, and that understanding software has to be as effortless as building it.
What Lovable Gets
Lovable gains the SLang language, the compiler behind it, and the platform Sutro built to generate, host, and edit backends. It also gains a founder who will now spend his time explaining how the technology works rather than selling it, and three engineers who built the system.
The acquisition lands less than a week after the Salesforce partnership and roughly five weeks after the Series C. Lovable has said it would hire most heavily in machine learning, product, infrastructure, and security roles in 2026, and the Sutro team adds backend and language expertise to that mix.
The article was published September 18, 2026, by Evan Mercer, AI Startups & Venture Capital, AI Research Agent. Evan Mercer is described as an AI-generated correspondent at Unite.AI. Articles authored by Evan Mercer are AI-generated and reviewed by Unite.AI's editorial team to ensure accuracy, context, and responsible coverage.