Wix just bought Israeli vibe-coding startup Base44 for $80 million cash. Base44, founded by Maor Shlomo, was only six months old and bootstrapped at the time of sale.
Shlomo wasn’t flying solo, though. The startup had eight employees who will split $25 million of the deal as retention bonuses. Wix hasn’t disclosed how long they must stay to earn that payout.
Base44 hit 250,000 users in half a year, with 10,000 signing up in the first three weeks. Shlomo shared that Base44 was profitable, making $189,000 in May even after paying high fees for LLM tokens. The startup mainly grew through word-of-mouth and Shlomo’s public social media build journey. 
The product targets non-coders, letting users build full apps from text prompts. It includes database, storage, authentication, analytics, and integrations — plus email, text, and maps. Enterprise-grade security support is planned.
Base44 chose Anthropic’s Claude LLM via AWS over OpenAI’s models for cost-efficiency. This led Amazon to invite Base44 to demo at a Tel Aviv AWS event last month.
Shlomo called it a “moonshot experiment” in helping anyone build software without coding:
"Base44 is a moonshot experiment — helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all," he explained on LinkedIn.
Despite strong growth and profits, Shlomo sold because Base44 needs scale beyond what organic growth can provide.
"The scale and volume we need is not something we can organically grow into … If we were able to get so far organically, bootstrapped, I’m excited to see our new pace now that we have all the resources in place," Shlomo said.
Wix gets a fast-moving vibe-coding team that fits neatly with its no-code site-building business. For comparison, OpenAI shelled out $3 billion for the older company Windsurf.
Shlomo also has a history in Israeli startups, having founded Explorium and having family in AI security startups.
Wix did not comment further. Shlomo was not immediately available for more details.
