Maor Shlomo had already learned how to run a company when he decided he would rather build a product. There is a considerable difference between those occupations, although startup culture tends to issue them the same business card. At Explorium, the business he co-founded in 2017, growth had brought the usual executive responsibilities. By the time he began Base44, he wanted more of his working day back at the keyboard.
The new project had an appealingly domestic starting point. His partner, Yuval, ran a tattoo business. She needed software that suited the way she actually worked. She had tried existing tools; the fit was awkward. Shlomo saw a practical opening for the coding abilities emerging from large language models. Put those abilities together with the infrastructure an application needs, and perhaps a business owner could describe her own software into existence.
It was a small enough problem to understand across a kitchen table, even if the eventual implications were rather larger. The customer would know what she wanted. The machinery would handle more of the technical translation. Before the acquisition figures and revenue milestones, there was this familiar commercial inconvenience: someone had a business to run, and the available software required too much accommodation.
Before the solo founder, three co-founders
Shlomo’s earlier company was built around a different obstacle: finding useful data. Alongside Or Tamir and Omer Har, he developed Explorium to connect a company’s own information with external data signals. A prediction can have an impressive algorithm behind it and still suffer from an impoverished view of the world. Explorium offered analysts and data scientists a way to broaden that view.
By May 2021, it employed 130 people. A $75 million Series C led by Insight Partners brought reported total funding to more than $127 million. Its customers included businesses such as PepsiCo and Melio. For Shlomo, then CEO, this meant experience with the institutional machinery of technology: investors, enterprise customers, a growing workforce, and expectations about what should happen next.
Those years matter to the Base44 story. The later solo founder arrived with experience of selling to organizations and managing a business that had moved well beyond its original team. Choosing to bootstrap his next project was an informed departure from a route he had already travelled. He knew what a larger company asked of the person whose name appeared next to CEO.
An old quarrel with the calendar
There were clues well before Base44 that Shlomo’s relationship with executive life might be complicated. In 2021, he advised managers to be selective about meetings and to put recurring ones together on a single day. He preferred chat for routine communication. Managers, he argued, should judge their contribution by the value they deliver, including the work they sometimes need to do themselves.
His answers to lighter questions supplied a useful counterweight to the management advice. His preferred drink was whiskey. His book recommendation was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Asked where he would live if he could choose anywhere, he chose Tel Aviv. Asked why he worked in technology, he offered a less solemn theory: “My nose is too big to be a Victoria’s Secret model.”
He also named Marc Benioff as someone he would like to meet for lunch. These are small details, but they bring a person back into a story that can otherwise disappear under financial figures. There is a dry sense of humor here, alongside a rather consistent impatience with having the useful hours of a working day divided into appointments.
The first audience was within reach
When Shlomo discussed Base44’s beginnings in 2025, he also described helping the Scouts organization in Israel with software. Between that work and his partner’s business, he had users whose needs were close enough to inspect. That is a useful position for a builder: the person struggling with a product can explain the struggle directly, before it becomes an abstract item in a dashboard.
He began alone and financed the company without outside venture investment. LinkedIn became an important way to tell people what he was making. Building in public gave prospective customers something more concrete than a promise about the future: they could see the product changing. As usage grew, that public account of the work became part of how the work found its audience.
The early experience also changed his sense of selling. He later recalled discovering that a stranger had paid $100 for the product. After years of enterprise calls, contracts, and proofs of concept, the direct purchase delighted him. In his recollection, he was still in his pajamas. The transaction had skipped a great deal of ceremony. A customer wanted the thing, and bought it.
A stranger bought the product. The founder was still in his pajamas.
Give the software somewhere to live
Base44’s central decision concerned what happened after an AI generated code. A person building a useful application still needed somewhere to store information, a way for users to sign in, and a running service people could actually reach. Each extra account or configuration step risked sending a nontechnical customer back to the problem they had hoped to avoid.
Shlomo’s approach brought those pieces together. The platform included database capabilities, authentication, email, analytics, logs, and connections to language models. Its technical choices deliberately narrowed the decisions both users and AI had to make. An integrated environment could do more of the repetitive work behind the scenes while the customer concentrated on what the application should do.
This helps explain the appeal beyond an impressive demonstration. A beautiful screen is pleasant; a working customer portal is useful on Monday morning. Shlomo was interested in shortening the distance between a description and that usable result. The engineering work sat beneath an experience designed to make the customer feel less like a systems administrator. Someone still had to manage the complexity. Base44 put more of it on its own side of the counter.
A buyer, and a crowded calendar
By May 2025, Shlomo was talking with Wix co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami about what Base44 might become. They met at Abrahami’s home. The decision in front of Shlomo was practical as well as financial. Continuing independently would require more funding and more hiring. Wix could offer an existing organization and distribution at a point when competitors were moving quickly.
On June 18, Wix announced the acquisition for approximately $80 million in initial consideration, with additional performance-based earn-outs through 2029. The announcement said Base44 would remain a distinct product and business. It also described about $25 million in employee retention payments within that initial consideration. The headline price therefore needs to be read as transaction terms, rather than as a personal bank balance.
Shlomo retained a job as well as gaining a buyer. He continued leading Base44, now with a larger company behind it. That arrangement answered an immediate problem: a product could reach more people without its founder personally doing every task required to reach them. It also made his original wish for a smaller operation more complicated. Success had returned him to the question of how to organize other people.
Protect the hours in which things get made
The change did not cure his dislike of unnecessary meetings. By December 2025, he was pushing to keep weekly meetings and one-to-ones off the calendar. The team held a short daily gathering, then returned to shipping. He was still spending part of his time testing AI infrastructure. The concern he named was “product velocity,” a precise phrase for wanting the work to keep moving.
That preoccupation had a technical counterpart. At the time, he favored choosing among different AI models for different tasks, rather than treating a single model as the answer to everything. The product depended on being able to adapt as those tools improved. For a founder who wanted to stay close to building, testing the underlying machinery remained part of the job.
There were personal events in the middle of all this. He proposed to his partner during the acquisition negotiations in May. He kept the deal from his parents and siblings until it closed, rather than make an announcement that might fall apart. Even an unusually quick business story contains stretches in which its central character is waiting for a signature and deciding when to tell the family.
How much of the founder’s day is left for building?
The question running through his second act
The numbers kept changing the job
The acquisition did not freeze Base44 at the size Wix bought. By March 2026, the business had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In May, that figure was approximately $150 million. In August, Shlomo announced it had passed $200 million; Abrahami also reported more than 10 million users. The small project had acquired a very large audience.
Annual recurring revenue expresses the annualized pace of recurring subscriptions at a point in time. It helps show growth, but should be kept separate from cash received across a completed year. For Shlomo, the sequence made a different point visible: deciding to sell had not meant stepping away from the experiment. The product continued to grow inside the organization he had chosen.
Growth also brought a bill. In August, Wix said Base44 had entered 2026 with near-zero non-GAAP gross margin. It expected roughly 60 percent in the second half after deploying Base 1, its own language model. That was a forecast, with computing costs at the center of it. Making software easier to create does not abolish the cost of running the machinery. At this scale, the machinery becomes a major management decision.
A smaller queue for everyone else
In September 2026, Base44 introduced Base Code, extending its approach to existing codebases. Teams could connect a GitHub repository to a shared cloud workspace, describe changes in chat, and preview them. Proposed updates could then move through pull requests and the organization’s established review process. Engineers retained responsibility for review and release while colleagues gained another way to contribute.
The audience had widened from someone starting an application to people waiting for changes inside an organization. A product manager, designer, or operations colleague could help move work forward without first reproducing a developer’s local setup. The recurring ambition was recognizable: reduce the practical obstacles between knowing what needs changing and being able to change it.
For Shlomo, this makes an interesting destination. He started Base44 wanting a working life with more time to make things. His company now sells that possibility to other people, including people inside companies with plenty of meetings of their own. The original ambition survives, although the scale has changed considerably. He wanted a smaller company. What he keeps trying to make smaller is the wait.
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