Estonia’s bilt.me raises €615k with backing from Bolt and Lightyear founders to scale its AI-native mobile app builder
bilt.me, a Tallinn-based AI-native mobile app builder, has raised €614.9k ($700k) in a pre-Seed funding round.
The round was led by Superhero Capital, a Seed-stage VC backing software-driven startups across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The round also saw backing from Bolt founder Markus Villig and Lightyear founder Martin Sokk.
“We should be honest with ourselves. Europe is behind on energy, behind on chips, behind on AI infrastructure, behind on the frontier models – those races may already be decided elsewhere. But there’s one layer where Europe is still world-class: the application layer, turning AI into things real people use and pay for,” said Uku Joost Annus, co-founder and CEO, bilt.me.
bilt.me was founded in August 2025 by Annus, Kevin Akkermann, and Karl Kiilaspää as a hackathon project to address Apple’s app-testing restrictions. Still in their early 20s, they won the inaugural cohort of ruum, a hacker space in Tallinn’s Krulli Quarter. The company has six engineers and streams the building of its own apps live on Twitch.
Like other generative AI apps, users describe an app idea in plain language, and bilt.me’s AI agent builds it, previews it on their phone and helps publish it to the App Store or Google Play. Unlike other AI app builders that generate web apps, bilt.me argues that it allows its users to produce native Android and iOS apps without writing a single line of code.
“There are more than a billion websites but only a few million apps: apps are harder to build, so fewer people make them, and that gap is exactly where bilt.me sees its opportunity to empower everyone to become an entrepreneur,“ Annus added.
It is not just an AI-native app development platform, though. Since it supports native development, the company has also built the supporting infrastructure. It has created its own payments, cloud and sharing layers, called Bilt Payments, Bilt Cloud and Bilt Link, respectively.
The company says users can export the React Native code behind their apps. It offers a free tier, with paid plans starting from €13 ($15) per month, and an enterprise offering with SSO, SCIM and zero data retention.
bilt.me says it has passed six figures in annual recurring revenue, with revenue doubling month over month for three straight months. In terms of users, the company says thousands of people are building on the platform, roughly 75% consumer apps and 25% private or in-house tools. Its users have already published paid apps on both app stores.
“When I was 19, building an app was one of the biggest barriers to turning my idea into a company. Bilt.me is removing that barrier for the next generation of entrepreneurs. If anyone with an idea can build and launch a real product, we unlock far more people to start companies, solve problems, and create something valuable,” said Markus Villig, founder and CEO, Bolt.
The pre-Seed funding will be used by bilt.me to expand globally and further develop its platform’s capabilities. In the long term, the company wants to become the go-to platform for anyone to become an entrepreneur through mobile apps.
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