Since Wix.com Ltd. (Nasdaq: WIX) bought Base44 last year, the acquisition has become its main growth engine. In May alone, Base44 recorded annual recurring revenue (ARR) of about $150 million, compared with just several million when it was acquired.
Base44 is a vibe coding company that allows users to create digital works using natural language, without the need for code. Now it is announcing a technological-strategic development: the launch of its own large language model (LLM), which should free it in the long term from dependence on third parties, and save costs for the company itself and its users.
Maor Shlomo, founder and CEO of Base44, tells Globes that “Base44 has grown to a fairly significant size, we have a lot of traffic, users and data, which allows us to train our models – to give users the best combination of quality, speed, effectiveness and price.”
“Our own model – a strategic advantage”
The company’s announcement states that the model performs competitively against the models it replaces, with the possibility of overtaking them as its training continues and the data grows. So far, Base44 has been based on existing models, such as Cloud, ChatGPT and Google.
“These are models that are good for many things,” says Shlomo. “They can quote Chinese poetry or write code. But precisely because they are so general, there is potential for specialization in the field. Because Base44 deals specifically with apps that non-technical users build for the web or mobile, there is room to train a model that works best for what our users do.”
Recently, the US government decided to block foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s AI model, which only reinforces the need to reduce dependency. According to Shlomo, the company started working on its model even earlier, several months ago.
He says, “We knew which way the winds were blowing. It’s a strategic advantage to control the model, which allows us freedom and efficiency. We don’t depend on another player. It’s only become more important since the blocking. This is a strategic effort that will continue in the coming years. We want to control all the components of the platform from end to end. There aren’t many groups in Israel that train models, and that’s incredibly important, especially when the US government is blocking the use of advanced models.”
In the long run, Shlomo hopes that the model will be good not only at implementing code, but also at helping the user make decisions about the product. He explains, “If we manage to crack it, that would be amazing. We see a lot of apps that build on Base and try to find the pattern that characterizes the successful ones in traffic and put it into a model that can help in decisions on how to design, and what the most suitable features are.”
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Wix, managed by Avishai Abrahami, is traded at a market cap of $1.8 billion after recently reaching a decade-low (a 72% drop in the share price in the past year). The company is seen as one of the losers from the development of AI, and the acquisition of Base44 was part of its attempt to deal with the challenge. Recently, Wix announced the layoff of about 20% of its workforce (1,000 employees), partly due to the strengthening shekel and the desire to become a leaner, more streamlined company.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on June 29, 2026.
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