There’s a lot of talk in the startup world about how AI makes individuals so productive that it could give rise to a generation of “solo unicorns” – one-person companies worth over $1 billion.
While an actual solo unicorn remains a mythical creature, Israeli developer Maor Shlomo provided compelling evidence Wednesday that the concept might not be impossible.
Shlomo sold his six-month-old, bootstrapped vibe-coding startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million deal, Wix announced Wednesday. And the deal was cash, Wix confirmed to TechCrunch.
Admittedly, this wasn’t a billion dollars or close to it. And Shlomo wasn’t truly solo — he had 8 employees, Wix confirmed. They will collectively receive $25 million of the $80 million as a “retention” bonus. Wix declined to give details on that part of the deal, like how long they have to stay in their jobs to get full payouts.
Still, Base44’s rapid rise and impressive sale price has been the talk of the vibe coding community.
In its six months as a standalone company, it reportedly grew to 250,000 users, hitting 10,000 users within its first three weeks. According to Shlomo’s posts on X and LinkedIn, the company was profitable, generating $189,000 in profit in May even after covering high LLM token costs, which he also documented publicly.
Base44 spread mostly through word of mouth as Shlomo, a 31-year-old programmer, shared his building journey on LinkedIn and Twitter. The project began as side venture, he told Israeli tech news site CTech.
“Base44 is a moonshot experiment – helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all,” he explained on LinkedIn when he launched it to the public.
It’s one of the newer crop of vibe-coding products designed for non-programmers. Users enter text prompts, and the platform builds complete 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 isn’t unique in this area. Other vibe coders like Adaptive Computer handle similar infrastructure work. But Base44’s fast rise was astounding all the same.
Shlomo was already known in the Israeli startup community through his previous startup, the Insight Partners-backed data analytics startup Explorium. His brother is also a co-founder of an AI security startup, Token Security, which just raised $20 million led by Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital) and a bunch of Israeli tech angels.
He quickly gained partnership agreements for Base44 with big Israeli tech companies like eToro and Similarweb.
After posting about his decision to use Anthropic’s Claude LLM through AWS instead of models by OpenAI — mostly for cost-per-performance reasons — Amazon invited Base44 to demo at a Tel Aviv AWS event last month, which Shlomo documented.
“Crazy f***ing journey so far,” Shlomo posted on LinkedIn when announcing the news of the acquisition. Despite the growth and the profits – or really because of it – he sold his still-bootstrapped company because “the scale and volume we need is not something we can organically grow into … If we were able to get so far organically, bootstrapped, I’m excited to see our new pace now that we have all the resources in place,” he wrote.
For its part, Wix picked up a proven, fast-growing, local vibe-coding platform for a relative song because of its youth. OpenAI paid $3 billion for Windsurf, which was funded in 2021.
Wix, of course, offers no-code website building that look professionally designed. Adding a profitable LLM vibe coding product to its offerings is a logical move.
Shlomo could not be immediately reached for additional comment.
