When Wix bought Base44 in June 2025, a one-person startup founded by Maor Shlomo, for about $80 million, many saw it as an older company's attempt to buy a ticket into the AI era. A year and a half later, Base44's ARR is nearing $250 million. Relative to the price paid, it is one of the most successful acquisitions in Israeli tech.
But that success is changing Wix from within. The legacy business, building websites for small businesses, grows slowly. Base44 grows very fast. That means a growing share of Wix's growth, and of the story it tells investors, depends on one product in a new and very crowded market, where competitors include both well-funded startups and the AI giants themselves.
The sensitive point is profitability. Classic website building has high gross margins: servers are relatively cheap and the customer pays every month. A tool that builds apps using language models is a completely different business: every user action costs money in compute. Abrahami himself has said Base44's gross margin is much lower than Wix's. The improvement to 58% last quarter is impressive, and the promise to reach about 70% in 2027 depends on AI costs continuing to fall.
And there is another, less comfortable question: who the customers are. Vibe coding tools attract millions of users trying to build something, but it is unclear how many will stay and pay over time. ARR built fast can also erode fast, if users find a cheaper tool, or if ChatGPT and Claude build similar capabilities directly into their products.
Bottom line, Base44 gave Wix something it lacked: a credible growth story. But a growth story is also a commitment. From now on, every quarter in which Base44 does not grow sharply will be read as a warning sign for all of Wix. The company has turned from what it was, a stable, profitable business with slow growth, into a bet on AI. It was probably the right move, but it is also a bet.
