Website-builder Wix.com has paid $80 million in cash for Base44, the six-month-old Israeli AI platform that generates full software applications from text prompts.
Founder Maor Shlomo, 31, bootstrapped Base44 after leaving data-analytics firm Explorium; the company amassed 250,000 users and May profits of $189,000 despite heavy LLM costs.
Its conversational AI builds databases, authentication and integrations in minutes, positioning it at the forefront of “vibe coding” tools that let non-programmers ship production apps.
Wix said the eight-person Base44 team will receive $25 million in retention bonuses and will embed the technology across Wix’s no-code ecosystem to accelerate full-stack application development for its global customer base of 300 million users.