In June 2025, Wix acquired Base44, an AI-native application-building platform for about $80 million, with additional earn-out payments tied to performance. At the time of the acquisition, Base44 was only about six months old.
Base44’s History and Financial Trajectory
Base44 was founded by Maor Shlomo with a simple proposition: software should be created by describing what you want rather than by learning how to code. Before founding Base44, Shlomo served as the co-founder and CEO (and CTO) of Explorium, a data acquisition and business insights platform. With Base44, he took the idea of natural-language software creation to an extreme. Users could describe an application conversationally and Base44 would construct not just the interface, but the underlying infrastructure required to make the application functional.
The acquisition initially looked like a bet on the emerging “vibe coding” category: the idea that users can describe software in natural language and AI can generate the application, database, authentication, infrastructure, and deployment without traditional programming.
That thesis has since been dramatically validated. When Wix announced the acquisition in June 2025, Base44 had only a few million dollars of ARR. Wix initially projected that the business could reach $40–50 million of ARR by the end of 2025. By Q3, the company had more than two million users and was adding more than 1,000 paying subscribers per day.
By March 2026, Wix reported that Base44 had reached $100 million of ARR. By May, that figure had reached approximately $150 million. In Q2 2026, Base44 remained a major driver of Wix’s growth, while the company continued investing aggressively in the product, marketing, and its proprietary AI infrastructure.
Wix said in its Q2 2026 earnings discussion that roughly 40% of Base44 users were building personal projects and roughly 60% were building business-oriented applications. Management also noted that Base44 already had more large enterprises than Wix itself, underscoring the breadth of the product’s appeal.
Base44 is moving beyond simple code generation. In June 2026, Base44 launched Base 1, its own proprietary large language model for application creation. The strategic importance of this move goes beyond model quality. Owning more of the inference stack gives Base44 greater control over cost, latency, product iteration and the economics of scaling AI-generated applications.
Wix has begun positioning Base44 as a complementary layer to its broader business platform. Its current Base44 offering can build customized management tools and AI agents around a Wix business, including dashboards, operational assistants and customer-facing experiences.
That creates the possibility of a much bigger platform. The number of applications created is an impressive vanity metric. The number of successful businesses created is much more interesting. An AI system can generate millions of applications. The marginal cost of producing another application is rapidly approaching the cost of inference.
The Strategic Significance of the Wix Acquisition
Wix gives Base44 something a standalone startup would struggle to replicate: a large installed base, business infrastructure, payments, commerce, hosting, analytics and distribution. The interesting question now is no longer whether Base44 can become a successful AI coding product. The more important question is: What does Base44 become after AI makes application creation nearly free? I believe the next strategic imperative is to move from vibe coding to venture creation.
More importantly, the acquisition has given Wix something it did not previously have at comparable scale: a significant position in the application-development market, beyond websites. Wix historically democratized website creation. The original Wix proposition was essentially that you don’t need to hire a web developer to establish your presence on the Internet. Base44 extends that proposition: You don’t need to hire a software development team to build the software your business needs.
That is a much larger opportunity. A small business does not need only a website. It may need a CRM, inventory system, booking system, employee dashboard, customer portal, internal workflow, analytics application, marketing automation system, or specialized operational tool.
Historically, those applications were purchased from SaaS vendors or commissioned from software developers. Vibe coding changes the economic equation. Instead of asking, “Which SaaS product should I buy?” a business can increasingly ask, “What software should I build?”
But AI cannot eliminate the fundamental scarcity of entrepreneurship:
Which problem is worth solving?
Who is the customer?
What will the customer pay for?
How should the product be positioned?
How does the founder acquire the first 100 customers?
How does the company reach $1 million in ARR?
How does it become profitable?
The bottleneck moves from software production to business judgment. That is the opportunity for Base44: to become an AI co-founder.
The Wix Advantage
Wix may have an unusual strategic advantage in this evolution. The company already owns much of the infrastructure surrounding digital businesses. Its ecosystem includes websites, domains, commerce, payments, marketing, analytics, customer management and other business services. Base44 adds programmable application creation to that stack.
This creates a potentially powerful flywheel:
Idea? Application? Website? Customer Acquisition? Payments? Operations? Analytics? Growth
Historically, those functions were supplied by dozens of independent software companies. AI makes it possible to unify them.
Wix’s July 2026 launch of Wix Headless, which brings Wix business infrastructure to AI coding tools and vibe platforms, is another indication of this strategic direction. Rather than keeping its infrastructure confined to traditional Wix-created websites, Wix is increasingly making its business stack available to AI-generated applications.
Base44 could therefore become the application layer on top of the Wix business operating system.
The Economics Will Matter
There is, however, an important challenge. Vibe coding can be extraordinarily compute-intensive. In Q2 2026, Wix said Base44’s gross margin had been close to zero at the beginning of the year, largely because of AI costs. The company expects Base44’s non-GAAP gross margin to approach approximately 60% in the second half of 2026 as its proprietary Base 1 model reduces inference costs.
This is strategically important. The winner in AI application development will not necessarily be the company that generates the most sophisticated code. It may be the company that can generate useful software economically. Owning the model, controlling inference costs, optimizing the application-generation pipeline and monetizing the resulting businesses could become significant competitive advantages.
What Base44 Should Become
Base44 should resist becoming simply another AI coding product. The coding layer will increasingly commoditize. The enduring opportunity lies above the code. Base44 should become the platform where an individual moves from:
Idea ? Product ? Customers ? Revenue ? Business
That means expanding from application generation into entrepreneurship development. That is where the next competitive battle will be fought and where organizations like 1Mby1M can become highly complementary.
1Mby1M can mentor AI-native builders to make the transition from creating applications to building enduring businesses.The product roadmap could eventually include AI-powered market research, product strategy, pricing, customer discovery, growth experimentation, sales automation, financial analytics and operational management.
There are hundreds of millions of small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs worldwide. Most cannot afford dedicated software-development teams. Many cannot justify buying dozens of specialized SaaS products. But they can describe what they need. If AI can turn those descriptions into functioning businesses, the addressable market becomes dramatically larger than the developer market.
That is why Base44’s trajectory matters. Its $150 million-plus ARR run rate is impressive. But the more interesting number may ultimately be the amount of economic activity generated by the businesses built on the platform.
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