- bilt.me, the Shopify of mobile apps, lets anyone build and sell native apps with no coding required
- The company, led by founders in their early 20s, has raised €615K to power its next phase of growth
- The pre-seed round was led by Superhero Capital, with backing from Bolt’s Markus Villig and Lightyear’s Martin Sokk
TALLINN, Estonia – 28 September 2026 – bilt.me, the AI-native mobile app developer for everyone, has raised €615,000 ($700,000) in pre-seed funding led by Superhero Capital, with backing from Bolt founder Markus Villig and Lightyear founder Martin Sokk.
The round is a bet on a contrarian read of Europe’s position in AI. “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,” said Uku Joost Annus, co-founder and CEO. “But there’s one layer where Europe is still world-class: the application layer, turning AI into things real people use and pay for. That layer runs on builders, and we don’t have nearly enough of them. Everyone told us the magic was in San Francisco. We went, and came home more convinced than ever that the builders are already here.”
“Our bet is that apps, not websites, are where the next generation of businesses gets built,” said Annus. Users describe their idea in plain language, and bilt.me’s AI agent builds the app, previews it on their phone, and helps publish it to the App Store and Google Play. Most AI app builders today generate web apps. bilt.me builds native iOS and Android apps, and users can export the React Native code behind them. There are more than a billion websites but only a few million apps. Apps are harder to build, so fewer people make them, and bilt.me sees that gap as its opportunity to make everyone an entrepreneur. Building native also means building everything around the app. With no strong tools on the market, the team made its own payments, cloud, and sharing layers: Bilt Payments, Bilt Cloud, and Bilt Link.
The approach is working. bilt.me has passed six figures in annual recurring revenue, and revenue has doubled month over month for three straight months. Thousands of people are building on the platform, roughly 75% making consumer apps and 25% making private or in-house tools, and real, paying apps are live in the App Store and Google Play. bilt.me offers a free tier, paid plans from €13 ($15) per month, and an enterprise plan with SSO, SCIM, and zero data retention.
Annus, Kevin Akkermann, and Karl Kiilaspää founded bilt.me in August 2025. It began as a hackathon project fighting Apple’s app-testing restrictions and became an AI agent that carries a person from idea to a live app. The team won the inaugural cohort of ruum, the hacker space in Tallinn’s Krulli Quarter. bilt.me is the newest bet from a country that produces more startup unicorns per capita than almost anywhere else in the world, the same ecosystem behind Skype, Wise, Bolt, and Pipedrive. Now two of its own, Villig and Sokk, are backing the next generation.
“When I was 19, building an app was one of the biggest barriers to turning my idea into a company,” said Villig. “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.”
“Our users are living at the frontier of AI,” said Annus. “They take knowledge only they have, solve a problem everyone shares, and build a real business out of nothing in almost no time. It’s ridiculous to watch.”
The founders, all in their early 20s, ship daily and build in the open, streaming the making of bilt.me’s own apps live on Twitch. The whole company is six engineers. The new capital will fund worldwide expansion and further development of the platform. The long-term goal is to become the go-to platform for anyone to become an entrepreneur through mobile apps.
As featured in EU-Startups.
About bilt.me
bilt.me is the AI-native mobile app developer for everyone. It lets anyone build, deploy, and sell a real mobile app without writing code. Founded in 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia.
Media contact: Uku Joost Annus · uku@bilt.me · Media kit · Brandbook