On October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, Maor Shlomo was called up for reserve duty with Unit 8200. During that deployment, his unit was asked to help a nonprofit build a few simple internal tools — the sort of lightweight apps that organizations need to function but rarely think of as engineering work. He made calls. He got quotes. The numbers stopped him: tens of thousands of dollars, months of development time, whole teams of engineers for software that amounted, at its core, to a form connected to a database.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the gap between how hard that problem was to state and how expensive it was to solve.
“I achieved the Holy Grail,” he would tell Calcalist Tech a year later. “I built software that builds software.”
What Base44 does
Fourteen months after that deployment, Shlomo launched Base44: a platform that lets anyone describe a web application in plain language and receive a fully functional, production-ready product on the other end. No code required. No developer. No technical background. The category had a name by then — “vibe coding” — and Base44 was its fastest-growing entrant.
He was 31. He built it completely alone. He has severe ADHD, and he had no co-founder, no investor, and no team.
Three weeks
Base44 launched in early 2025. Within three weeks, it had crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Within four weeks, it had reached $1.5 million ARR. There was no paid marketing behind those numbers — Shlomo documented the project publicly on LinkedIn and X, sharing progress, user counts, and product decisions as he made them. Building in public drove more growth than any paid channel could have at that stage.
By the time Wix came calling, Base44 had more than 250,000 users. The customer base included business names — eToro and SimilarWeb among them — alongside the individual builders, product managers, and entrepreneurs who were discovering that app development no longer required an engineering degree.
The VCs he said no to
Israel’s venture capital community is active, and what Shlomo had built was visible. He declined all of it.
“Almost every fund operating here approached me,” he told Calcalist Tech. “But I wanted to continue bootstrapping.”
There was a structural logic to the refusal. He had no team to hire, no office to fill, no infrastructure to scale beyond what the product required. The business was generating roughly $200,000 per month from subscriptions priced between $20 and $200. There was no reason, in Shlomo’s read of the situation, to complicate what was already working.
The deal
On June 18, 2025, Wix announced it had acquired Base44 for $80 million.
The company was approximately four months old.
Wix framed the acquisition as central to its expansion into AI-assisted development — the emerging category where users build and modify software through conversation rather than code. Base44 was not the only platform in the space, but it was the one that had grown fastest, and it had done so without a marketing team, a sales department, or a dollar of outside investment.
The acquisition terms included earn-outs tied to performance through 2029 and a $25 million retention pool. Calcalist Tech subsequently reported that Shlomo stood to receive an additional $90 million in cash if post-acquisition performance milestones were met.
What solo costs
The numbers are exceptional. The conditions that produced them are worth being honest about.
“Yes, absolutely I felt lonely,” Shlomo said at EY Israel’s Journey Conference, reflecting on the experience of building Base44 without a co-founder. “When the difficult moments come, there’s no one to share the burden with.”
He didn’t frame that as a reason not to build alone. He was direct about the tradeoff: “My view, though it’s not for everyone, is that centralized decision-making is best in the early stages.”
Speed and clarity of ownership are real advantages for a solo founder at the pre-product-market-fit stage. What they’re traded for is the distribution of weight when things break, when numbers don’t move, when the pressure accumulates with nowhere to go. Shlomo carried that weight through a war, through ADHD, and through a growth trajectory that would have stressed a team of ten.
After the deal
The acquisition was the beginning of a different chapter, not the end of the story.
Post-acquisition, Base44 remained a standalone product unit within Wix. By late 2025, the platform had grown to over two million users — roughly eight times its user count at the time of the deal — and was tracking toward $50 million in annual recurring revenue. More than 1,000 new paying subscribers were joining each day, and Wix had placed Base44 at the center of its earnings narrative.
What Shlomo built in a few months on a laptop — an idea that came to him in uniform, watching a nonprofit get priced out of a form and a database — had become a business generating ARR figures that most funded startups don’t see in their first three years.
The tools available to a single founder in 2025 — AI code generation, natural language interfaces, cloud infrastructure that scales without an ops team — compressed timelines that used to require years and rooms full of engineers. Shlomo is perhaps the sharpest single data point in the argument that those timelines have genuinely changed.
He did it with ADHD, during a war, without a co-founder, and without taking a shekel of investment. In six months.
2026: from $80 million to $100 million a year
Wix’s own filings show what happened next. In its fourth-quarter results, filed with the SEC on March 4, 2026, Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami said: “Base44 recently reached $100 million in ARR, just one year after its founding and 9 months after our acquisition.” Wix paid $80 million up front for a product that, nine months later, was bringing in $100 million a year in recurring revenue.
It kept going. Wix’s first-quarter release, filed May 13, lists ”~$150 million of ARR as of May” among its Base44 highlights and credits “new cohort momentum powered by Base44 strength” for the quarter’s growth. The second-quarter release of August 4 adds the cost side. Base44 launched Base 1, its own model, in the quarter, and Wix now expects Base44’s non-GAAP gross margin to be about 60% in the second half of 2026, against “near-zero” at the start of the year. “The deployment of Base 1 marks a turning point in lowering our AI inference and compute costs,” said CFO Lior Shemesh.
The growth had a price for the buyer too. Wix’s full-year 2025 release warned that “the more Base44 top-line growth outperforms, the more pressure on near-term FCF margin,” because every app a user builds costs compute. Owning the model is how Wix plans to bring that cost down.
For Shlomo, the arithmetic matters beyond pride. Calcalist Tech reported that he stood to receive up to $90 million more if performance milestones were met. The milestones themselves have not been published, so whether they have been reached is not public.
Related founders
- Alex Mashrabov Sold AI Factory for $166M. Higgsfield Hit $5.4B. — an AI founder who sold his first company to Snap for $166 million, then built a far larger second one.
- Amjad Masad Stopped Teaching People to Code. Revenue Grew 50x. — the same “describe it, don’t code it” bet, built at a much larger company rather than solo.
- How Danny Postma Built HeadshotPro to $3.6M ARR — Alone — another solo founder who built and sold one AI product, then built the next one without a co-founder or outside funding.
- Yasser Elsaid Built Chatbase to $10M ARR, No VC, No Sales Team — another bootstrapped solo founder who scaled past $10M ARR on product-led growth, no investors, no sales team.
- Four Products, $1.99: How Damon Chen Turned Failure Into a $2M Bootstrapped Business — a solo founder who built Testimonial.to to $2M ARR by solving a problem he had himself, then doubled down with a second acquisition.
Quotes from Maor Shlomo are drawn from his interview with Calcalist Tech (“I achieved the Holy Grail: I built software that builds software,” calcalistech.com) and his remarks at EY Israel’s Journey Conference as reported by Calcalist Tech. The October 7 context and Unit 8200 detail are from Calcalist Tech’s reporting. Acquisition terms from Wix’s official press release (GlobeNewswire, June 18, 2025) and Calcalist Tech’s follow-up reporting on the $90M earn-out milestone. Post-acquisition user and ARR figures from Calcalist Tech (2025). The 2026 ARR, margin and Base 1 figures and the Abrahami and Shemesh quotes are from Wix’s Q4 2025, Q1 2026 and Q2 2026 results releases (SEC Form 6-K exhibits of March 4, May 13 and August 4, 2026), opened directly on sec.gov. Updated October 28, 2026.
