Theres a lot of talk in the start-up world about how AI makes individuals so productive that it might give rise to a generation of solo unicorns one-person business worth over $1 billion.While an actual solo unicorn stays a mythical animal, Israeli designer Maor Shlomo provided compelling proof Wednesday that the principle might not be impossible.Shlomo sold his 6-month-old, bootstrapped vibe-coding startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million, Wix revealed Wednesday.
And the offer was money, Wix verified to A Technology NewsRoom.Admittedly, this wasnt a billion dollars or close to it.
And Shlomo wasnt truly solo he had eight workers, Wix verified.
They will jointly get $25 million of the $80 million as a retention benefit.
Wix decreased to provide information on that part of the offer, like for how long they need to stay in their jobs to get complete payouts.Still, Base44s fast rise and remarkable list price have been the talk of the vibe-coding community.In its six months as a stand-alone company, Base44 reportedly grew to 250,000 users, striking 10,000 users within its very first 3 weeks.
According to Shlomos posts on X and LinkedIn, the business was profitable, creating $189,000 in profit in May even after covering high LLM token expenses, which he likewise recorded publicly.Base44 spread mainly through word of mouth as Shlomo, a 31-year-old developer, shared his building journey on LinkedIn and Twitter.
The project began as a side endeavor, he told Israeli tech news site CTech.Base44 is a moonshot experiment helping everyone, technical or not, construct software without coding at all, he described on LinkedIn when he released it to the public.Its one of the more recent crop of vibe-coding products designed for non-programmers.
Users go into text prompts, and the platform builds total applications, with database, storage, authentication, analytics, and integration.
It also supports email, texting, and maps, with a roadmap for more enterprise-grade security support.Base44 isnt special in this area.
Other vibe coders like Adaptive Computer manage similar infrastructure work.
Base44s quick increase was astonishing all the same.Shlomo was currently known in the Israeli start-up community through his previous startup, the Insight Partners-backed data analytics business Explorium.
His sibling is likewise a co-founder of an AI security start-up, Token Security, which simply raised $20 million led by Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital) and a lot of Israeli tech angels.He rapidly gained collaboration arrangements for Base44 with huge Israeli tech business like eToro and Similarweb.After publishing about his decision to use Anthropics Claude LLM through AWS instead of models by OpenAI mainly for cost-per-performance factors Amazon welcomed Base44 to demo at a Tel Aviv AWS event last month, which Shlomo documented.Crazy f *** ing journey so far, Shlomo published on LinkedIn when announcing the news of the acquisition.
Regardless of the development and the revenues or really due to the fact that of it he sold his still-bootstrapped business since the scale and volume we require is not something we can organically turn into If we were able to get so far organically, bootstrapped, Im delighted to see our brand-new pace now that we have all the resources in place, he wrote.For its part, Wix picked up a shown, fast-growing, regional vibe-coding platform for a relative tune because of its youth.
OpenAI paid $3 billion for Windsurf, which was established in 2021.
Wix, of course, offers no-code site building that look professionally created.
Including a successful LLM vibe-coding item to its offerings is a sensible move.Shlomo might not be immediately reached for additional remark.