Wix has formalized the basic acquisition44, an Israeli startup specializing in the No-Code development piloted by IA, for an amount of $ 80 million in cash. Founded only six months ago by Maor Shlomo, the company had not raised any fundraising, had eight employees, and posted profitability from its fifth month of activity.
Base44 allows any user, without technical skills, to generate functional applications via textual instructions. The product automatically manages back-end layers, authentication, storage, integrations, analytics, and modules such as email or cartography. The architecture is fueled by the Claude d’Anthropic model, selected for its cost-performance efficiency.
In a message published after the announcement, Maor Shlomo insists on the logic behind this decision: “This market is advancing very, very quickly. We have an exceptional momentum, probably the strongest I saw at this stage for a bootstrapée startup. But the scale that we must reach cannot be reached organically. He explains that he made the decision after several white nights of discussions with Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix. “It’s a good time, and the right partner. »»
The alignment between the two companies was central to the process with the same product vision, the same obsession with the user experience, the same user base. “It is not a formula that I repeat mechanically. In our case, it is sincerely true, ”he specifies. The displayed objective is now to strengthen the innovation capacity, speed up support, grow the community and extend B2B features. The team remains unchanged. A retention bonus of $ 25 million will be distributed between the eight employees.
Base44 claims 250,000 users acquired in six months, with a public launch that generated 10,000 registrations from the first three weeks. The whole thing, carried mainly by word of mouth and regular publications on X and LinkedIn. In May, the startup recorded a net profit of $ 189,000, a performance made possible by an optimized architecture and a controlled infrastructure cost, even with the intensive use of LLM models.
This acquisition illustrates a substantive trend with the collapse of entry barriers for software development. Where dozens of developers were needed, several million dollars and months of coordination, a small team, army of good AI tools, can now design a complete, stable and marketable product in a few weeks. The promise of the Ai-Native becomes reality with the compression of costs, the acceleration of the Time-to-Market, and the reduction of the need for external capital.
For Wix, the operation makes it possible to strengthen its historic platform for creating sites with an additional brick focused on application development by prompt. The addition of basic44 is part of a functional upmarket strategy, in a context where actors like Framer, Webflow or concept intensify their efforts on the NO-Code increased by IA.
“It is the first basic day44,” concludes Shlomo in his post. “What we have accomplished in organic mode is already impressive. With Wix’s resources, we now have everything you need to build something really transformer, on a scale. »»
