Wix, the well-known website-building company from Israel, is buying a one-person startup called Base44 for $80 million. The total amount could go up if Base44, founded by Maor Shlomo, hits certain revenue goals by 2029.
Base44 has recently gained a lot of attention from programmers and the AI community in Israel and around the world. This is thanks to an easy-to-use, prompt-based tool created by Maor Shlomo, a 31-year-old programmer. He built it shortly after finishing a long reserve army duty following the October 7 attacks.
Just six months after starting the company—and without taking any outside funding—Shlomo is now making a quick and successful exit. He is the only owner of the company, which has fewer than 10 employees.
Shlomo’s tool lets people create apps or games just by typing a simple text prompt—no coding skills needed, similar to how you use ChatGPT. In just a few months, Base44 gained over 100,000 users and formed partnerships with major Israeli tech companies like eToro and Similarweb.
“There’s no better fit,” Shlomo told the Media. “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.”
Even though he’s still young, Base44 isn’t Maor Shlomo’s first startup. Before the war, he was the CEO of Explorium, a big-data company he co-founded in 2017. Explorium has over 100 employees and has raised about $125 million, mainly from Insight Partners.
Shlomo started Explorium when he was just 24, right after finishing his service in the Israeli Intelligence Corps. After returning from reserve duty at the end of 2024, he decided not to go back to Explorium. Instead, he started working on what would later become Base44—originally just a side project during a trip he took after his army service.
Shlomo, who is very active on LinkedIn and X, shared that about half of Base44’s users are from the U.S., a quarter are from Israel, and the rest are from other countries.
About two weeks ago, Shlomo shared that Base44 had made a profit of $189,000—almost double the $100,000 he originally expected.
Interestingly, Wix, the company buying Base44, had been losing money for years, even though it makes over $1 billion in revenue each year.
Wix, a company that helps people build websites without coding, is buying Base44 as a smart move because AI is becoming more popular.
Wix plans to add Base44’s easy chat-like tool to its current services so users can quickly create complete apps.
Base44 is part of a new group of startups called “vibe coding,” where instead of writing code, users just describe what they want, and AI does the work. Another company like this is Lovable from Sweden.
Base44 offers a simple chat-like tool that takes care of all the technical stuff behind the scenes—like setting up databases, managing permissions, and launching apps—so users can focus on their ideas. The goal is to help people who don’t know how to code create software easily.
Wix says buying Base44 won’t change its 2025 sales or orders much, but it will spend about $25 million this year on salaries and stock for the Base44 team.
Like many tech companies, Wix is embracing AI. In early 2025, it launched Wixel, an AI tool that makes design easier for everyone. Wix’s CEO, Avishai Abrahami, said, “Wixel will do for design what Wix did for website creation—make creativity possible for everyone.” Wix also introduced Astro, a personal AI helper that guides users on the platform and helps them use 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.
Even so, Wix and Base44 are working together with a bigger goal in mind—more than just adding a new feature to Wix’s current products.
“I’m already a Wix employee,” Shlomo explains, “but we’ll retain the Base44 brand and product 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.”
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