Six-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash
There is a lot of talk in the startup world about how AI makes individuals so productive that it can give rise to a generation of “Solo Unicorns” -Personal companies with a value of more than $ 1 billion.
Although a real solo -a horn remains a mythical being, the Israeli developer Maor Shlomo provided convincing proof on Wednesday that the concept may not be impossible.
Shlomo sold its 6-months old, Bootstrapped atmospheric startup Base44 to Wix for $ 80 million, Wix announced Wednesday. And the deal was cash, Wix confirmed to WAN.
Admittedly, this was not a billion dollar or close by. And Shlomo wasn’t really solo – he had eight employees, Wix confirmed. Together they receive $ 25 million of $ 80 million as a “retention” bonus. Wix refused to give details about that part of the deal, such as how long they have to stay in their work to get full payouts.
Yet the rapid rise and impressive selling price of BASE44 are talking about the Atmosphere coding community.
In his six months as standing company, BASE44 reportedly grew to 250,000 users and hit 10,000 users within the first three weeks. According to Shlomos messages On X and LinkedIn, the company was profitable and generated $ 189,000 in profit in May, even after covering Hoge LLM tender costs, which he also publicly documented.
Base44 usually spread through word of mouth, while Shlomo, a 31-year-old programmer, shared his construction trip on LinkedIn and Twitter. The project started as a side company, he said Israeli technical news site Ctech.
“Base44 is a Moonshot experiment – helping everyone, technical or not, building software without coding at all,” he explained on LinkedIn When he launched it to the public.
It is one of the newer harvest of atmospheric coding products that are designed for non-programmers. Users enter text prompts and the platform builds complete applications, with database, storage, authentication, analysis and integration. It also supports e-mail, SMS and maps, with a route map for more security support for companies.
Base44 is not unique in this area. Other atmosphere coders such as adaptive computer use comparable infrastructure work. But the rapid rise in Base44 was surprising.
Shlomo was already known in the Israeli startup community through his previous startup, the Insight Partners-backed Data Analytics Company Explorium. His brother is also co-founder of an AI Security Startup, token Security, who has just collected $ 20 million under the leadership of remarkable capital (formerly GGV Capital) and a couple of Israeli technical angels.
He quickly obtained partnership agreements for BASE44 with large Israeli technology companies such as Etoro and comparable web.
After posting about his decision to use Anthropic’s Claude LLM via AWS instead of models of OpenAI-MESTAL to release cost-perpetual Amazon Base44 to demonstrate last month at a Tel Aviv AWS event, that Shlomo documented.
“Crazy F *** ING Journey so far,” Shlomo Posted on LinkedIn When announcing the news of the acquisition. Despite the growth and the profit or really because of the sold, he is still left company because “the scale and the volume we need is not something that we can grow organically in … If we can be organically, bootstrapped, I am excited to see our new pace now that we have all the resources,” he wrote.
For his part, Wix picked up a proven, fast -growing, local atmospheric coding platform for a relative song because of his youth. OpenAi paid $ 3 billion for Windsurf, which was founded in 2021.
Wix of course does not offer code website building that looks professionally designed. Adding a profitable LLM-solving coding product to its offer is a logical move.
Shlomo could not be reached immediately for extra comments.
