‘Shopify of mobile apps’ bilt.me raises $700K to turn ideas into mobile businesses

Estonian AI app-building startup bilt.me has picked up $700,000 in pre-seed funding. Superhero Capital led the round, with backing from Bolt founder Markus Villig and Lightyear founder Martin Sokk.

The company was founded in August 2025 by Uku Joost Annus, Kevin Akkermann and Karl Kiilaspää. It began as a hackathon project aimed at getting around Apple’s app-testing restrictions, then grew into something broader: an AI agent that can take a person from a rough idea to a live mobile app.

That focus matters. A lot of AI app builders spit out web apps. bilt.me is aiming squarely at native iOS and Android software, which means more moving parts and, as the company found, more infrastructure to build along the way. So it created its own payments, cloud and sharing layers: Bilt Payments, Bilt Cloud and Bilt Link.

The numbers suggest there’s already real demand. bilt.me says it has passed six figures in annual recurring revenue, with revenue doubling month over month for three straight months. Thousands of people are using the platform, and about 75% of the apps being built are consumer products, while 25% are private or in-house tools. Some of those paid apps are already live on the App Store and Google Play.

Annus is also making a bigger argument about where Europe can still compete in AI. He says the region is behind in energy, semiconductors, AI infrastructure and frontier models, but can still lead at the application layer, where AI gets turned into something people actually use and pay for. The new funding is meant to push that idea outward, with global expansion and more development of the app-building platform itself.