TEL AVIV, June 19, 2025 — Wix has acquired AI startup Base44 for $80 million in cash, the company confirmed Wednesday, marking a rapid exit for 31-year-old developer Maor Shlomo, who launched the business just six months ago.

Base44, which grew from a side project into a profitable operation with 250,000 users, was bootstrapped and had a team of eight. Wix said $25 million of the purchase price is allocated as retention compensation for those employees. Specific terms around the retention were not disclosed.

While the deal falls short of the "solo unicorn" status that has gained traction in startup circles, Maor's ability to build and sell a profitable AI-driven software company without outside funding has drawn attention across Israel's tech sector.

Base44’s core product allows users to build applications using simple text prompts, eliminating the need for coding. The system supports data storage, authentication, analytics, email, and other features, with plans for enhanced security capabilities.

Maor documented much of the company’s growth publicly on LinkedIn and X, reporting a $189,000 profit in May, despite high cloud computing costs. The company reached 10,000 users within three weeks of launch and scaled primarily through word of mouth.

“Base44 is a moonshot experiment, helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all,” Maor said in a LinkedIn post when he launched the tool.

The acquisition brings a profitable large language model (LLM)-based application builder into Wix’s ecosystem. Known for its no-code website design tools, Wix stands to gain by integrating Base44’s infrastructure-level capabilities.

Base44 had secured early partnerships with local firms including eToro and Similarweb. After Maor publicly chose Anthropic’s Claude via AWS over OpenAI models, Amazon invited Base44 to demo at its Tel Aviv event last month.

Wix’s offer appears modest relative to recent deals in the space. OpenAI paid $3 billion for Windsurf, an AI infrastructure firm founded in 2021.

Maor, already known as co-founder of the Insight Partners-backed analytics company Explorium, said the decision to sell was driven by infrastructure scale. “The scale and volume we need is not something we can organically grow into,” he wrote.

Maor’s brother is also a co-founder at Token Security, which recently raised $20 million led by Notable Capital.

Wix did not provide additional detail on integration timelines, and Maor could not be immediately reached for comment.