--- title: >- He Made $189,000 in Profit in a Single Month, Then Sold the Whole Thing to Wix for $80 Million. Six Months In. dek: >- Maor Shlomo signed the Wix deal the morning a war broke out. Six months, $189,000 in May profit, $80 million in cash. The clean version of this story skips the parts that matter. slug: maor-shlomo-base44-wix-exit publishedAt: '2026-06-16' author: diego-ferraro reviewedBy: Agnel Nieves pillar: founder-on-the-wire tags: - founders - base44 - wix - vibecoding - exits summary: >- Maor Shlomo built Base44, a prompt-to-app builder, as a side project and sold it to Wix for $80 million in cash six months later. The numbers are real: $1M ARR three weeks after launch, $189,000 profit in May 2025, 250,000 users. So are the asterisks: eight employees by the sale, a $127M-funded company already on his resume, and an acquirer whose stock has halved while Base44's compute bill grows. Both halves are the story. draft: false heroImage: /blog/maor-shlomo-base44-wix-exit.webp heroImageAlt: >- Engraved illustration of a smiling man in an ornate oval frame amid stacks of dollar bills, certificate and smartphone on green background with yellow spot color on currency and floral borders. heroVideo: /blog/maor-shlomo-base44-wix-exit.mp4 ogImage: /blog/maor-shlomo-base44-wix-exit-og.jpg assetCredit: Hero illustration and animation generated with Grok. --- The lawyers finished the Base44 paperwork on a Thursday night. The signing was set for Friday morning. That same Friday morning, the war with Iran broke out. Maor Shlomo signed anyway. That detail is the whole story in miniature. A guy in Israel, between reserve duty call-ups, sells a company he started as a side project, and the missiles are a scheduling problem. ## The setup Shlomo was not a kid with a dream and a laptop. He had already co-founded Explorium, a data analytics company that raised a total of $127 million, capped by a $75 million Series C led by Insight Partners, per [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vibe-coder-base44-sells-to-wix-for-80m-cash/). He left, did reserve duty after October 7, and came back restless. Base44 started because his girlfriend needed a website for her art business and he was helping the Israeli Scouts with some software. He kept hitting the same wall. As he told [CEO Insider](https://ceoinsider.io/interview/maor-shlomo), "Both times I realized, 'LLMs should be able to build this.'" So he built the thing that builds the thing. Base44 turns a plain-English prompt into a working web app, database and login and all. No code. ## The moment something worked Here is where the numbers start, and they are silly. He told his girlfriend that if they hit $1.5M in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025, they would buy a nice car. They hit it in four weeks. He said this out loud on [Lenny's Podcast](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-base44-bootstrapped-startup-success-story-maor-shlomo), the same place he confirmed he hit $1 million ARR three weeks after launch and grew to more than 400,000 users without spending money on marketing. Ten thousand users showed up in the first three weeks. By the six-month mark he was reportedly at 250,000 users, per [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vibe-coder-base44-sells-to-wix-for-80m-cash/). Then the profit number. In May 2025, Base44 made $189,000 in profit. Not revenue, profit. Shlomo posted it himself on LinkedIn, and the figure got passed around the founder world fast. > "Base44 ended up making $189K *profit* in May and today got acquired by Wix for $80m..." > > [@PrivatEquityGuy on X](https://x.com/PrivatEquityGuy/status/1935405148014019002) Per [Calcalist](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/j7bfdhkor), "Shlomo reported that the company had generated a profit of $189,000, nearly double his initial forecast of $100,000." I want to flag what that profit survived, because it is the part that almost broke him. ## The moment something almost broke Base44 calls large language models to generate full apps in real time. Every single request costs money. In May, model calls were 89% of Base44's total spend, according to a detailed [breakdown via 36Kr](https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3393744947939456) of his public posts. That is a business where the cost of goods sold tries to eat you alive. Shlomo's fix was unglamorous. He moved off OpenAI's API to cheaper routes through AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Anthropic, chasing cost-per-performance. He also stopped charging users for failed outputs, which sounds generous until you realize a model that keeps making mistakes just burns more tokens on his dime. He leaned on Cursor and Claude for development. He said on Lenny's that he had not written a line of front-end code in three months. The AI wrote it. He architected. ## The verdict, with the asterisks In June 2025, Wix bought Base44 for $80 million in cash, with earn-outs running through 2029. Now the honesty section, because the clean version of this story is a lie of omission. First, "solo" is doing heavy lifting. Wix confirmed to TechCrunch that Base44 had eight employees at the sale, and $25 million of the $80 million was a retention pool for them. Shlomo ran it alone for most of the six months and hired his first employee about six weeks before the deal, but the word "solo" on the marketing materials is a stretch by the finish line. Second, the Explorium history matters more than the takes admit. A first-time nobody does not get a warm introduction to Wix's CEO. Shlomo was already known in Israeli tech, he was named to Forbes Israel's 30 Under 30 in 2020, and that network is a real input that you cannot copy by using Cursor. Third, and this is the uncomfortable one for anyone treating the $80 million as the moral of the story. The acquisition has been rough on the acquirer. Base44 hit $100 million ARR nine months after the deal, per [Calcalist](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bkqq0pry11e), which is genuinely wild growth. But Calcalist also reports Wix's stock has lost nearly half its value in 2026, and that Base44's compute and marketing costs are a heavy drag on the company that bought it. The thing grows beautifully and bleeds cash at the same time. Both are true. For Shlomo personally, it kept paying. Calcalist reports he is [set to receive another $90 million](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjm11dastwl) if milestones hit, on top of the headline price. So what is the actual lesson here. It is not "quit and vibe-code an $80 million exit by Friday." It is narrower and more useful. He picked a problem he personally had, twice. He shipped while it was embarrassing and broke often. He watched real users in real time and removed friction. And he understood his cost structure cold, which is the part most AI founders wave away until the GPU bill arrives and the math stops working. He told Lenny something that has stuck with me. The best product feedback at $5M ARR was the same as at $150M ARR. People close to you, who feel comfortable telling you the truth. The tooling changed. That part did not. ## Sources - [Lenny's Podcast / Newsletter, Maor Shlomo interview](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-base44-bootstrapped-startup-success-story-maor-shlomo) - [TechCrunch, Wix acquires Base44](https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vibe-coder-base44-sells-to-wix-for-80m-cash/) - [LinkedIn, Shlomo on $189K May profit](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maor-shlomo-1088b4144_base44-ended-up-making-189k-profit-in-may-activity-7336025796509077504-OzSO) - [Calcalist, Base44 hits $100M ARR](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bkqq0pry11e) - [Calcalist, Shlomo $90M milestone payout](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjm11dastwl) - [Calcalist, Base44 booming, Wix collapsing](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/j7bfdhkor) - [36Kr, cost breakdown](https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3393744947939456) - [CEO Insider interview](https://ceoinsider.io/interview/maor-shlomo) - [X, PrivatEquityGuy citing the $189K post](https://x.com/PrivatEquityGuy/status/1935405148014019002)