Wix paid $80M for Israel's Base44. It's now nearing $250M in ARR

What's the deal? Base44Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the Israeli AI app-building platform Wix bought in June 2025 for about $80 million upfront, is now nearing $250 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), Calcalist reports. That is up from roughly $200 million in August, and it makes Base44 Wix's main growth engine, well past what the company expected when it bought it.

What does Base44 do? Maor Shlomo started it as a bootstrapped side project in late 2024. It lets people build working apps by describing them in plain language ("vibe coding"). When Wix bought it, Base44 was about six months old and had fewer than 10 employees; earn-outs run through 2029.

What's in the numbers? Base44 helped lift Wix's Q3 revenue 13% year on year to $570 million, with bookings of $573 million, up 11%. Base44's non-GAAP gross margin reached 58% in Q3, up from near zero in Q1, as Wix moves traffic onto its own Base 1 model to cut AI inference costs.

The catch: Growth is expensive. Wix lowered its 2026 free-cash-flow margin outlook to about 16%, citing heavier Base44 marketing. ARR is a run rate, not realised annual revenue, so retention matters as much as the headline figure. Early signs are encouraging: renewal rates for the first Base44 cohort beat expectations at 12 months, and annual plans made up more than 20% of subscriptions in the September 2026 cohort, against about 5% a year earlier.

The leadership shift: Wix named longtime president and chief operating officer Nir Zohar co-CEO alongside co-founder Avishai Abrahami, who will focus on product and technology. "Base44, our biggest bet, continues to outperform expectations," Abrahami said.

The signal: An $80 million acquisition now generates close to $250 million a year in recurring revenue, a rare case of an incumbent buying its way into the AI-native wave cheaply and early. It also cuts against the market mood: Dealroom's AI-mogging analysis found vibe-coding rival Lovable valued at about 4.1 times Wix itself ($13.3B vs $3.2B). Base44 is Wix's argument that a listed company can still own a piece of that growth.

Read more: Calcalist (CTech), 10 November 2026

Photo: Wix headquarters in Tel Aviv. Calcalist.