Wix Acquires Six-Month-Old Vibe Coder Base44 for $80M in Cash

In a testament to the rapid growth and potential of AI-driven startups, Wix has acquired Base44, a vibe-coding company founded just six months ago by Israeli developer Maor Shlomo, for $80 million in cash. This acquisition highlights the increasing recognition of individual productivity boosted by AI, potentially leading to a new era of “solo unicorns.”

Wix announced the acquisition on Wednesday, confirming that the entire deal was made in cash. While Base44 isn’t quite a solo endeavor—Shlomo had eight employees—the company’s swift ascent has sparked considerable discussion in the vibe-coding community.

Of the $80 million, $25 million is earmarked as a retention bonus for Base44’s employees. Details regarding the specifics of the retention agreement, such as the duration of employment required for full payouts, remain undisclosed.

Base44 reportedly amassed 250,000 users within its short lifespan, achieving 10,000 users within the first three weeks. Shlomo shared on LinkedIn and X that the company was profitable, generating $189,000 in profit in May, even after accounting for significant LLM token costs.

The company’s growth was primarily organic, fueled by Shlomo’s active sharing of his development journey on LinkedIn and Twitter. He told Israeli tech news site CTech that the project started as a side venture.

Base44 is designed to enable users, regardless of their technical expertise, to build software without coding. The platform allows users to input text prompts to generate complete applications with integrated database, storage, authentication, analytics, email, texting, and mapping capabilities. Plans are in place to add more enterprise-level security features.

While not the only player in the vibe-coding space, Base44’s rapid rise to prominence has been remarkable. Shlomo was already a known figure in the Israeli startup ecosystem through his previous venture, Explorium, a data analytics company backed by Insight Partners. His brother also co-founded AI security startup, Token Security, which recently secured $20 million in funding.

Base44 quickly established partnerships with major Israeli tech firms such as eToro and Similarweb. Shlomo’s decision to use Anthropic’s Claude LLM via AWS led to an invitation to demo at an AWS event in Tel Aviv last month, which he documented.

Shlomo commented on LinkedIn that despite the company’s rapid growth and profitability, he chose to sell because the necessary scale could not be achieved organically. He expressed excitement about the new possibilities with the resources provided by Wix.

For Wix, acquiring Base44 represents a strategic move to integrate a proven and rapidly expanding vibe-coding platform into its offerings. This move aligns with the growing trend of no-code and low-code solutions, as exemplified by OpenAI’s acquisition of Windsurf for $3 billion. Adding a profitable LLM vibe-coding product complements Wix’s existing no-code website-building capabilities.