Wix acquired vibe-coding startup Base44 for $80 million in an all-cash deal, the company announced Wednesday.
Though often described as a solo-founded venture by Maor Shlomo, Wix confirmed that Base44 had a team of eight employees. Wix allocated $25 million of the total acquisition amount as a “retention” bonus for the Base44 team. However, it did not disclose details like the vesting period or payout terms.
Base44’s meteoric growth and impressive exit have become a hot topic in the vibe-coding community. Within just six months, the platform grew to 250,000 users, hitting 10,000 in its first three weeks alone. According to Shlomo’s posts on X and LinkedIn, the company was already profitable—generating $189,000 in profit in May—despite substantial costs from LLM token usage, which he had openly documented.
“Base44 is a moonshot experiment — helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all,” he explained on LinkedIn when he launched it to the public.
Despite the growth and the profits — or really because of it — he sold his still-bootstrapped company because “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,” he wrote.
For its part, Wix acquired a proven, rapidly growing local vibe-coding platform at a relatively modest price—largely due to the startup’s early-stage status.
Wix, known for its no-code website builder that helps users create professionally designed sites, has made a strategic move by adding a profitable LLM-powered vibe-coding product to its portfolio. The acquisition aligns well with its broader vision to enhance AI development tools.
