Solo founder's Base44 acquired by Wix for $80M

The AI era is officially here, and not even the war between Israel and Iran is slowing it down: Israeli website-building giant Wix is acquiring one-man startup Base44 for $80 million. That amount may increase if the company, founded by Maor Shlomo, meets revenue targets by 2029.

Base44 has drawn significant attention from the programming and AI communities in Israel and abroad in recent months, thanks to an intuitive, prompt-based tool built by Shlomo, a 31-year-old programmer, shortly after he completed an extended reserve duty following the October 7 attacks. Now, just six months after founding the company, and without raising any external funding, Shlomo is making a swift and lucrative exit as the sole shareholder of a company with fewer than 10 employees.

The tool Shlomo developed allows users to build apps or games with no coding experience, just by writing a simple text prompt, similar to interacting with ChatGPT. Within a few months, Base44 attracted over 100,000 users and signed partnership agreements with Israeli tech companies including eToro and Similarweb.

“There’s no better fit,” Shlomo told Calcalist. “Wix is probably the only company that can help us scale and distribute globally without slowing down our development, maybe even accelerating it. Our market is huge, and our system has the potential to replace entire software categories, simply because it lets people create software themselves instead of buying it.”

Despite his young age, Base44 is not Shlomo’s first startup. Prior to the war, he served as CEO of Explorium, a big-data predictive analytics company he co-founded in 2017. Explorium employs over 100 people and has raised around $125 million, mostly led by Insight Partners.

He founded Explorium at just 24, immediately after completing a long service in the Israeli Intelligence Corps. After returning from reserve duty at the end of 2024, he chose not to go back to Explorium. Instead, he began working on what would become Base44, not as a formal company at first, but as a side project that actually began during a post-reserve trip.

According to data shared by Shlomo on LinkedIn and X, where he is highly active, about half of Base44’s users are from the United States, a quarter from Israel, and the remainder from other countries around the world.

Roughly two weeks ago, Shlomo reported that the company had generated a profit of $189,000, nearly double his initial forecast of $100,000. It’s worth noting that Wix itself was a loss-making company until recently, despite generating annual revenues of over $1 billion.

For Wix, which essentially serves as a no-code platform for building websites, acquiring Base44 is a strategic step amid the rise of AI. The company plans to integrate Base44’s conversational interface into its existing tools, allowing users to quickly build full applications.

Base44 is part of a new wave of “vibe coding” startups - a movement away from traditional code-based development toward platforms where users simply describe what they want, and the AI executes it. Other notable companies in this space include Swedish startup Lovable.

Base44 provides an automated conversational interface that handles all the technical back-end work - database creation, permissions, deployment - so users can focus purely on their ideas. The goal is to make software creation accessible to non-programmers.

Wix estimates the acquisition will have minimal impact on 2025 revenue or order volume, but it expects to record a $25 million expense for salaries and equity compensation related to Base44 employees this year.

Like many tech companies, Wix is actively responding to the AI revolution. In its Q1 2025 earnings report, it unveiled Wixel, an AI-powered visual design tool. According to CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami, “Wixel will do for design what Wix did for website creation, put creativity in everyone’s hands.” The company also launched Astro, a personal AI assistant to guide users through the platform and promote the adoption of more advanced tools.

"The lawyers finalized all the details of the purchase agreement on Thursday night, and the signing was scheduled for Friday morning, just as the war with Iran began," said Shlomo, describing the impossible business environment in Israel.

Nevertheless, Wix and Base44 are moving forward together, with a shared vision that goes far beyond simply adding a new feature to Wix’s existing products.

"I’m already a Wix employee," Shlomo explains, "but we’ll retain the Base44 brand and product in order to realize our broader vision - one that could fundamentally transform the world of enterprise software. There’s an opportunity here to build something 'blue and white' that truly moves the needle, and that’s a rare thing in software."

"It’s true that I started the company as a kind of side project," he continues, "but if we can achieve what we’ve set out to do, every person and organization will be able to build the software they need to solve their specific pain points. It could be anything from a project management tool to a customer relationship management system. And we’ve already seen both private users and businesses create those kinds of applications using Base44 - with no programming knowledge whatsoever."

"Although we’ve grown rapidly, reaching a multi-million dollar revenue run rate and being profitable from day one, I realized that to play in the big leagues, we needed a strong partner. The market is moving fast, and scaling up improves our chances of long-term success. There were many interested parties, but Wix felt like the best fit in terms of DNA."

Wix President Nir Zohar confirms this alignment, telling Calcalist that the company had considered several other candidates. However, it ultimately concluded that while Base44 is currently smaller than its competitors, including Loveable AI and Bolt AI, its approach is more compelling.