In the startup world, there is much talk about how AI can make individuals productive and create a generation of “solo unicorns.” It’s a one-person company worth over $10 billion.
While the actual solo unicorn remains a mythical creature, Israeli developer Mar Shlomo provided persuasive evidence on Wednesday that the concept may not be impossible.
Shlomo has sold its six-month bootstrap-like atmosphere startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million, Wix announced Wednesday. And the transaction was cash, Wix was confirmed with TechCrunch.
Certainly, this wasn’t even a billion dollars or anything like that. And Shlomo wasn’t really solo. He had eight employees, Wix confirmed. They receive $25 million of the $80 million as a “hold” bonus. Wix refused to provide details about that part of the transaction, including the time he had to stay at work to get full payment.
Still, Base44’s rapid rise and impressive selling prices were the talk of the community that coded the atmosphere.
In six months as a Stand-Alone company, Base44 has grown to 250,000 users and reportedly hit 10,000 users within the first three weeks. According to a Shlomo post on X and LinkedIn, the company was profitable and generated $189,000 in May, even after covering the high costs of LLM tokens.
Base44 has spread mainly through word of mouth as 31-year-old programmer Shlomo shared his journey through the building on LinkedIn and Twitter. The project began as a side venture, he told Israeli technology news site CTECH.
“Base44 is a Moonshot experiment. It helps everyone build software without coding, technical or not,” he explained when it was released on LinkedIn.
This is one of the new crops with an atmosphere designed for non-programmers. Users enter text prompts and the platform builds a complete application with database, storage, authentication, analysis and integration. It also supports email, text messages and maps using roadmap for more enterprise-grade security support.
Base44 is not unique in this area. Other vibe codermors where Adaptive Computer handles similar infrastructure work. However, the rapid growth of Base44 was all just as surprising.
Shlomo was already known in the Israeli startup community through the Data Analytics Company Explorium, supported by his former startup Insight Partners. His brother is also co-founder of AI security startup Token Security, and raised $20 million, led by a bunch of well-known capital (formerly GGV Capital) and Israeli technology angels.
He soon won Base44 partnership agreements with large Israeli high-tech companies such as Etoro and Sirgerweb.
After posting about his decision to use AWS via AWS via AWS instead of Openai’s model, Amazon invited Base44 to the demo with a Tel Aviv AWS event documented by Shlomo.
“The crazy f***ing journey so far,” Shlomo posted on LinkedIn when he announced the acquisition news. Despite the growth and profits, or in reality, he still sold the bootstrap company.
For that part, Wix has featured a proven, rapidly growing local atmosphere platform for young people, for relative songs. Openai paid $3 billion for Windsurf, which was founded in 2021.
Of course, Wix offers codeless website construction that appears to be professionally designed. Providing profitable LLM vibe coding products is a logical move.
Shlomo was unable to contact us immediately due to additional comments.
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