Maor Shlomo, a 31-year-old Israeli developer, has now successfully sold his startup Base44 to the Israeli web company Wix for $80 million in cash. This huge accomplishment comes mere six months after the launch of Base44. This bootstrapped vibe-coding platform lets anyone develop virtually any software without learning to write a line of code. This acquisition is an exciting and important milestone for Shlomo. He documented the entire process of growing Base44 in real-time on his social channels, particularly LinkedIn and Twitter.
Base44’s adoption took off in the market, reaching 250,000 users in its first half year. In just the first three weeks, the platform garnered 10,000 users. Shlomo’s unconventional business model and novel approach to software development struck a chord with the industry, resulting in widespread adoption and a very profitable company. In May, he announced a $189,000 profit. That’s a pretty astounding accomplishment given all the labor intensive expenses associated with LLM token consumption.
In an email, Wix clarified that Base44 only had eight employees at the time of sale. This shows Shlomo’s ability to quickly put together a very effective team. His partnership agreements with major Israeli tech companies such as eToro and Similarweb further solidified Base44’s position in the market.
Shlomo’s background in technology is noteworthy. Prior to that, he was co-founder of Explorium, a data analytics/seamless data integration startup funded by Insight Partners. His success with Base44 was largely due to his prior experience in the tech industry. More importantly, it allowed him to leverage the experiences and knowledge he’d gained from launching new initiatives in the past.
Alongside Shlomo’s success, his brother is proving equally impactful in the tech sphere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those experiences led him to co-found Token Security, an AI security startup that recently raised $20 million. Notable Capital, previously GGV Capital, grew the round. They got funded by a half dozen Israeli tech angels after that. This piece of news is just the tip of a larger trend of innovation and investment occurring in the Israeli technology ecosystem.
Reflecting on Base44’s mission, Shlomo stated, “Base44 is a moonshot experiment – helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all.” This vision drove the startup’s meteoric growth and user adoption.