6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

Summary

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 6-month-old, bootstrapped vibe-coding startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million, 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 eight 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 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, 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 a 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. Bas...