Wix acquires AI coding startup Base44 for $80M

Israeli developer Maor Shlomo sold his six-month-old vibe-coding startup, Base44, to Wix for $80 million in cash, Wix announced Wednesday. Base44, which was bootstrapped, experienced rapid growth before the acquisition.

While not a “solo unicorn,” as Base44 had eight employees, the sale has generated discussion regarding the potential for highly productive individuals to create valuable companies using AI. Of the $80 million, $25 million will be distributed among the eight employees as a retention bonus, according to Wix. Details of the bonus distribution were not disclosed.

Base44 reportedly grew to 250,000 users within six months and reached 10,000 users in its first three weeks. Shlomo shared on X and LinkedIn that the company was profitable, generating $189,000 in profit in May, even after covering the costs of LLM tokens.

Shlomo, age 31, stated on LinkedIn upon the public launch of Base44 that it was conceived as “a moonshot experiment — helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all.” He also told Israeli tech news site CTech that the project began as a side venture. The company’s expansion was primarily driven through word of mouth, with Shlomo sharing updates on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Base44 is a vibe-coding platform that allows users to create applications by entering text prompts. The platform manages database, storage, authentication, analytics, and integration. It also supports email, texting, and maps and has plans to incorporate more enterprise-grade security features.

Shlomo was previously involved with Explorium, a data analytics company backed by Insight Partners. His brother is a co-founder of Token Security, an AI security startup that recently raised $20 million. Base44 secured partnership agreements with Israeli tech companies, including eToro and Similarweb.

Shlomo chose to use Anthropic’s Claude LLM through AWS, citing cost-per-performance advantages over OpenAI models. Following this decision, Amazon invited Base44 to demo at an AWS event in Tel Aviv last month.

“Crazy f***ing journey so far,” Shlomo posted on LinkedIn when announcing the acquisition. He cited scalability as a reason for the sale: “The scale and volume we need is not something we can organically grow into… If we were able to get so far organically, bootstrapped, I’m excited to see our new pace now that we have all the resources in place.”

Wix’s acquisition of Base44 provides them with a profitable LLM vibe-coding product, complementing their existing no-code website building platform. It was noted that OpenAI paid $3 billion for Windsurf, which was founded in 2021.

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