On Monday, September 28, 2026, Estonian startup bilt.me announced its €615K pre-seed round, led by Superhero Capital alongside Markus Villig from Bolt and Martin Sokk from Lightyear.
We sat down with co-founder Uku Joost Annus on Superhero News to talk about why they’re building, how they’re growing so fast, and where they’re heading.
Born from their own pain
bilt.me didn’t start as an AI app builder. A year and a half ago, the team was building its own mobile apps, starting with a menopause app for women. Founder-market fit wasn’t there, so they pivoted, but they came away very good at building mobile apps.
They also saw the problem up close. Even with three and a half full-time engineers, going from idea to a live app in the App Store or Google Play took two months. So the team ran an internal hackathon with one goal: make building and testing apps dramatically faster.
That hackathon became bilt.me. The first step was using AI agents to build apps without writing every line of code by hand. The second was getting through Apple’s and Google’s publishing process. Today the focus is the hardest part of all: distribution.
Solving the parts nobody wants to do
Most AI builders stop once the app exists. bilt.me keeps going. The platform generates a brand book for every app, so users have the context to create ad creatives, organic content, or briefs for UGC creators. The team also built what it calls the first AI-enabled mobile payments, which integrate directly with Apple. Founders no longer need a third-party tool that can take a week or two to set up.
The team makes bold bets. One of its first features was streaming a mobile simulator in the browser, which Uku believes was a world first. The team wasn’t sure whether Apple would ban them for it. “It’s really easy to find a hundred tasks that improve the user’s experience one percent,” Uku says. The team would rather build something no one else has had the nerve to try.
Young team, no rules
bilt.me has nine people with an average age of 23, and almost none of them have worked at a big corporation. Uku met his CTO Kevin through the Young Founders Association in Estonia. He recruited co-founder Karl after Karl’s name came up four times when Uku asked Estonian founders for the best engineers they knew. Uku called him at 9 p.m. on a weekend, while Karl was in the sauna with family, and pitched him the menopause app. Karl joined and never left.
AI runs through everything the company does. If something can be automated, it is.
Growth that speaks for itself
The numbers are why we’re excited. bilt.me has grown 100% month over month for almost four months and is aiming for close to 2M ARR by the end of the year. Growth comes from four channels:
- Product-led growth: Almost half the people who build on bilt.me share their apps, and 13% of traffic now comes from referrals.
- Hackathons: Live events convert 15% of attendees to paid, and the team believes it can scale to one or two events a day.
- AI search: After six months of steady work, about half of paying users now find bilt.me through AI search.
- Paid ads: After an early €20K lesson, ads are now at least breaking even.
A few thousand people build on the platform every month, spread from Australia and the US to Africa. There is no single dominant market.
Why mobile, and why now
More than six billion people have a smartphone, and most of them don’t have a computer. For much of the world, the phone is the gateway to everything. Apps can send notifications, A/B test everything, and build habits in ways websites can’t. App store review also brings built-in trust. There are around 1.5 billion websites but only a few million apps, so competition is lower and the space is safer.
The Shopify playbook
Uku openly models bilt.me on Shopify, which won by owning the hard parts of e-commerce: ad attribution and financing for brands that scale. bilt.me wants to do the same for mobile. It already covers building, editing, deploying, and publishing. Next it wants to automate distribution, so every builder gets a clear next step instead of a vague suggestion to go market their app.
“The ideas are definitely there,” Uku says. “Some of them are super cool and unique, and they really need to happen.”
We’re proud to back the team on this journey. Watch the full conversation on Superhero News, and try bilt.me yourself.