Base44 Found a Buyer Four Months After Launching

Serial entrepreneur Maor Shlomo attracted an eight-figure offer for his vibe-coding startup before hiring a single employee.

- BY BEN SHERRY

GOOD VIBES ONLY Maor Shlomo sacrificed sleep for the chance to be a vibe-coding pioneer. "If you can crack this," he remembers thinking, "you can open up the world of software to everyone."

Maor Shlomo had a vision of the holy grail of software. The Tel Aviv-based founder of B2B data platform Explorium had left his company in 2023 to join the Israeli army reserves. After a year of service, Shlomo decided to try making his vision a reality: an AI application enabling anyone to build software, simply by prompting a chatbot. He launched his startup, Base44, in February 2025, the same month OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy coined the term vibe coding to describe this new form of nontechnical programming.

As a solo founder, Shlomo handled every aspect of Base44, from sales to engineering to customer support. Early on, he would wake up every two to three hours to make sure the platform was still running. Just one month after launching, Base44 had generated nearly $1.5 million in revenue from subscriptions, which range in price from $20 to $200 per month. The company caught the attention of Israeli entrepreneur Avishai Abrahami, co-founder and CEO of the website-building platform Wix, and in May 2025, Shlomo and Abrahami discussed Base44's future over three meetings at Abrahami's home. The following month, Wix acquired the four-month-old startup for $80 million. Shlomo continues to run Base44 as its own product. Inc. recently caught up with him to discuss why he chose to sell, and how the deal has changed his life.

Was it always your plan to eventually sell Base44?