Base44 Revenue: Acquired by Wix for $80M, at $150M ARR a Year Later
Wix paid $80M cash for six-month-old, bootstrapped Base44 on June 18, 2025 — and by May 2026 the vibe-coding platform had reached $150M ARR. Every revenue figure, dated and sourced, plus what the deal has actually cost Wix.
On this page
Wix acquired Base44 for $80 million in cash on June 18, 2025 — six months after Maor Shlomo launched the vibe-coding platform as a bootstrapped side project with no outside investors and, by the end, eight employees. Base44's revenue at the moment of sale was modest: Wix would only describe it as "a few million" in ARR, and the most-cited estimate is roughly $3.5 million. What happened next is why the price now looks like a bargain. Under Wix, Base44 crossed $100 million ARR in early March 2026 — nine months after the acquisition, one year after founding, disclosed alongside Wix's Q4 2025 results — and reached $150 million ARR by May 2026, per Calcalist. The growth has a bill attached, though, and Wix is still paying it: earn-outs to Shlomo and a swing to quarterly losses.
What Wix bought: a six-month-old with 250,000 users and no investors
Shlomo, then 31, started building Base44 around the turn of 2025, after leaving Explorium, the data-analytics company he had co-founded in 2017. Base44 was the opposite of a venture-track startup: he was the sole shareholder, raised nothing, and grew the product by posting revenue numbers, costs, and setbacks on LinkedIn and X as they happened. TechCrunch's June 18, 2025 report on the deal put the trajectory in two numbers: 10,000 users within the first three weeks, 250,000 by the time Wix bought it.
It was also profitable — unusual for an AI product whose main input cost is LLM tokens. In early June 2025, Shlomo posted on LinkedIn that Base44 had made $189,000 in profit in May, against the $100,000 he had publicly forecast, after covering model costs. That post, more than any funnel, is what put the company on acquirers' radar: a solo-owned, cash-generating AI app builder growing on zero marketing spend.
The deal: $80 million cash — and that wasn't the final bill
Wix's June 18, 2025 announcement described the price as approximately $80 million in cash, plus earn-out payments through 2029 tied to performance targets. TechCrunch reported a further ~$25 million in retention bonuses for Base44's eight employees. Because Shlomo owned the whole company, the $80 million was, in effect, one person's outcome.
The earn-outs stopped being theoretical almost immediately. Base44 beat its targets so fast that Wix's Q2 2026 report disclosed an additional $41 million earn-out payment to Shlomo, and Calcalist calculated on August 4, 2026 that total consideration for Base44 has already passed $150 million. The headline "$80M acquisition" understates what Wix is actually paying — a point worth remembering when this deal gets cited as the cheapest AI acquisition of the cycle.
Base44 revenue, dated and sourced
| When | Figure | Who said it |
|---|---|---|
| May 2025 | $189K monthly profit | Maor Shlomo, LinkedIn, June 2025 |
| June 2025 (at acquisition) | "a few million" ARR; ~$3.5M is the common estimate | Wix, via Calcalist; the $3.5M figure is unofficial |
| August 2025 | $15M ARR | Shlomo on LinkedIn, as recorded on GetLatka's Base44 profile |
| March 2026 | $100M ARR | Wix, alongside Q4 2025 results (March 2026); Calcalist, March 2026 |
| May 2026 | $150M ARR | Calcalist, May 25, 2026 |
Calcalist also reported Base44 at roughly $50M ARR in early 2026, tripling to $150M within months. Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami, in August 2025: "This is a supersonic level of growth in just a matter of weeks."
From "a few million" to $150 million ARR in eleven months is one of the fastest revenue ramps ever recorded for a software product, and it happened almost entirely inside Wix — which is exactly what Shlomo said he was selling for. His stated reason for taking the deal at six months old: "the scale and volume we need is not something we can organically grow into" (via TechCrunch, June 18, 2025).
About our original headline. The first version of this article, published the morning of the deal, was titled "Base44 Acquired for $80m on $3.5m Revenue, a 22x Multiple." Two corrections. First, the $3.5M ARR-at-close figure has never been confirmed by Wix or Shlomo — the entry in GetLatka's own database traces to a Reddit thread, and Wix said only "a few million." Second, the multiple math no longer holds: with earn-outs already pushing total consideration past $150 million (Calcalist, August 2026), nobody outside the deal knows the true multiple — and at $150M ARR, it hardly matters. The earlier version also carried precision metrics (conversion rates, retention percentages, per-token costs) that appear in no source; they have been removed.
What the growth is costing Wix
Base44's ramp is not free money. In Q2 2026 — reported August 4, 2026 — Wix posted a net loss of $76.4 million against a $57.7 million net profit in the same quarter a year earlier, with sales and marketing spend up 67% year over year to $173 million. Calcalist attributes much of the swing to Base44: heavy compute costs plus a marketing push to hold its lead against Lovable and Replit, while Wix guides to roughly 10% revenue growth for 2026 with margins recovering in the second half. Calcalist put it more sharply in May 2026: Base44's growth "is masking a significant slowdown in the growth of Wix's original core products."
The scale-up shows in headcount too. Base44 had eight employees at acquisition; GetLatka's database now carries an estimate of roughly 416 people as of April 2026 (a Tracxn figure — treat it as an estimate, not a disclosure). Wix has kept Base44 as a standalone brand and product, with Shlomo still running it, and his earn-outs run through 2029 — so the incentive to keep publishing milestone numbers is very much alive. For the acquirer's side of the ledger, see our breakdown of Wix's revenue; for the tracked numbers on this company, the Base44 profile.
Sources
- TechCrunch, June 18, 2025 — 6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash
- Wix press release, June 18, 2025 — acquisition announcement
- Maor Shlomo on LinkedIn, June 2025 — "Base44 ended up making $189K profit in May"
- Calcalist (CTech), August 7, 2025 — "Supersonic growth": Base44 after the acquisition
- Calcalist (CTech), March 2026 — Base44 hits $100 million ARR nine months after Wix acquisition
- Calcalist (CTech), May 25, 2026 — Base44 is booming. So why is Wix collapsing?
- Calcalist (CTech), August 4, 2026 — Wix's Base44 bet: Q2 2026 losses and the $41M earn-out
- GetLatka: Base44 revenue, valuation and team data (updated August 21, 2026)
