Describe the app, get the app
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel (operating within Wix) | Founded: 2024 | Employees: Solo founder at acquisition; ~dozens within Wix today (est.) | Stage: Acquired by Wix (June 2025) for ~$80M plus earn-out through 2029 | Website: https://base44.com
Base44 turns plain-English descriptions into working software. A user types what they want — an inventory tracker, a booking system, a small CRM — and the platform generates a full application: front end, database, user accounts, file storage and hosting, all managed. Users iterate conversationally ('add a dashboard', 'let admins export to CSV'), and the result is a real deployed app rather than a mock-up.
The company was built almost as a provocation. Maor Shlomo, who had previously co-founded the data company Explorium, created Base44 as a side project in late 2024 and ran it alone: no team, no venture capital, building in public. Within six months it had 300,000 users and roughly $3.5 million of ARR while being genuinely profitable.
In June 2025, Wix acquired Base44 for approximately $80 million in cash plus earn-out payments through 2029. Under Wix, the product plugged into a customer base of millions of small businesses and kept scaling — $100M ARR by March 2026 and approaching $150% by May — becoming one of the headline growth stories in Wix's quarterly results.
Base44 is the definitive bootstrapped AI story of the vibe-coding era. Maor Shlomo — a serial Israeli founder who had previously co-founded data company Explorium — built it as a side project in late 2024: you describe an application in plain English, and Base44 hands back a working product with a database, authentication, file storage and hosting already wired up. No code, no stack decisions, no setup.
What happened next is the part people quote at conferences. With no employees and no funding, Base44 grew to roughly $3.5 million of ARR and 300,000-plus users in about six months, reportedly throwing off $189K of profit in a single month. In June 2025, Wix bought it for approximately $80 million in cash — plus earn-out payments running through 2029 (Wix has already paid $38M of them) — roughly four months after serious commercialization.
Inside Wix, the product kept compounding: $100M ARR in March 2026, approaching $150M by mid-May 2026, now a growth engine inside Wix's Business Solutions segment. On a ~$80M purchase price, that makes Base44 arguably the highest-ROI AI acquisition to date.
The strategic logic matters beyond the fairy tale. Wix bought a distribution machine — millions of small businesses already building web presences that now want actual software — while rivals (Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0) fight over developers and prosumers. The risk is the category itself: app builders are a knife-fight with heavy inference costs, and model vendors keep moving up the stack. But Base44's numbers suggest the no-code buyer is a different, and possibly larger, market than the developer one.
Browse: Home | Blog | About | All Startups A-Z | View full profile on StartupWiki