This 6-month-old AI startup just sold to Wix for $80 million

If you need a reality check on how fast the AI wave is moving, consider this: Maor Shlomo wrote his first line of code for Base44 last December. Yesterday, he sold the whole thing to Wix for $80 million—cash up-front, no venture investors to please.

Key Points

• $80 million cash deal plus future earn-outs takes Base44 off the market after just six months.
• Base44’s “vibe coding” chatbot spins up full-stack apps from natural-language prompts; last month it reportedly cleared $189k in profit.  
• Wix gets a fresh AI engine to complement its Site Generator and blogging bots, while Base44 stays a standalone product.  

Wix co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami called the pickup a “pivotal milestone” in his plan to let anyone build complex software by describing what they want and letting intelligent agents handle the plumbing. The $80 million price tag comes with additional earn-outs through 2029 plus about $25 million in retention bonuses for Base44’s tiny staff—mostly to keep Shlomo around.  

Base44’s pitch is dead simple: open a chat window, tell the bot you need an inventory system or a personal finance tracker, and wait a few minutes while it assembles databases, authentication, and deployment. No third-party integrations, no YAML, no arguing with a linter. The approach sits squarely in the new world of “vibe coding”—a term popularized by former OpenAI scientist Andrej Karpathy to describe intent-driven programming where syntax fades into the background.  

That friction-free workflow has been enough to attract paying customers like eToro and Similarweb and, according to a LinkedIn post Shlomo shared two weeks ago, $189,000 in profit in May on a user base still in the low thousands.

For Wix, Base44 plugs neatly into a portfolio that already includes the AI Site Generator unveiled last year and a blog-post-writing bot that launched in July. Together, these tools sketch a future in which Wix is less a drag-and-drop page builder and more a conversational AI factory for all things web.  

The larger story, though, is what the acquisition says about where software economics are headed. Investors have been talking for months about “solo unicorns”—the idea that a lone founder armed with foundation models could reach a billion-dollar valuation. Forbes argues the pieces are all there: cloud infra, off-the-shelf AI, and platforms like Base44 that automate the scaffolding.  

We’re not there yet; Base44’s exit is closer to a Series A round than a unicorn IPO. But it does validate the thesis that you can build something people will buy—fast—without a 30-person engineering squad. Midjourney, for instance, is reportedly pushing $300 million in annual revenue with barely a hundred employees, and Anysphere claims a similar revenue-per-headline ratio.  

Still, vibe coding isn’t a silver bullet. Enterprise dev teams worry about vendor lock-in, compliance headaches, and whether AI-generated code will be maintainable once the vibes wear off. Even Karpathy has warned that letting the machine write everything can create hidden technical debt. Yet tools that erase complexity tend to win in the long run, and Wix’s scale—250 million registered users and counting—gives Base44 a distribution firehose it could never open alone.  

Shlomo, for his part, says Wix is “probably the only company that can help Base44 achieve the scale and distribution it needs while accelerating our velocity.” Translation: he gets to keep shipping features while someone else handles sales, support, and compliance. Not bad for six months’ work.