Base44

A solo founder, after reserve duty

The Base44 story begins not with a business plan but with a side project. After returning from military reserve duty at the end of 2024, Maor Shlomo began building, on his own, a tool that turns a natural-language description into a working web app. According to interviews he gave, he had no team and no outside funding, and the original assumption was not necessarily to start a company. It was to solve a problem he had spotted himself: "brilliant people with real problems" stuck with workarounds in spreadsheets, or waiting months for a developer to be free. Within a few months the product became an actually profitable business, before a single dollar was raised from outside. This point comes up in every media story about the company as one of its most striking and unusual features.

The Wix deal: six months from founding to sale

On 18 June 2025, Wix officially announced the acquisition of Base44. According to TechCrunch, at the time of the acquisition the company was only about six months old and owned by a single founder, with no previous funding round. The purchase price Wix announced was about $80 million in cash, of which about $25 million was set aside as retention bonuses for eight employees who joined the deal along with Shlomo. Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami said: "This acquisition marks a pivotal milestone in Wix's commitment to transforming creation online." The agreement also included additional payments conditional on performance targets through 2029, so the actual final price could be significantly higher than the amount announced on signing day.

From $80 million to more than $150 million

The deal between Shlomo and Wix included not only an upfront payment but also an earn-out: future payments that depend on Base44 meeting revenue targets inside Wix. According to Wix's quarterly reports, Shlomo later became entitled to an additional payment of about $90 million on meeting milestones. According to later reports, the total amount he is entitled to grew to more than $150 million, with a further milestone payment of about $41 million expected later. The distinction matters: the amount announced on the day of the deal ($80 million) is only its initial part, not the final amount the founder may actually receive if performance stays as strong as it has been so far.

What happens inside Wix

After the acquisition, Base44 kept operating as a separate product within Wix's product portfolio, rather than being fully absorbed under another existing brand. According to Wix, within only about a year of its founding the product passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Wix reports this figure in its quarterly reports under "business solutions," and notes that the acquisition's contribution to its 2025 financial results was considered negligible, meaning most of the growth happened after the initial reporting period. Inside Wix, Base44 also launched its own proprietary language model called Base One, trained specifically to build web apps, as an attempt to build a task-focused model that outperforms general models in this narrow field.

Part of a wider wave: vibe coding

Base44 belongs to a wider wave of vibe coding tools that grew in the middle of this decade. These tools let people who are not programmers build working software from a natural-language description, not just a demo prototype. Replit Agent, introduced in September 2024, works in the same direction: according to Replit, "with only a few sentences and a few minutes, you can take an application from idea to deployment." Together, tools like these make up the wave of AI No-Code Product Builders. Base44's story stands out in this wave mainly because of the combination: a solo founder, with no early outside funding, who reached profitability before building a team and sold in a record six months. It is important to note that the growth and revenue figures reported for the company, both before and after the acquisition, all come from the company and from Wix themselves. They are not audited figures of the kind an independent outside auditor checks in an official financial statement. They should be treated as a reliable indication of direction and pace, not as a closed, final accounting number.