An impressive exit at the height of war. Additional evidence of the impressive resilience of Israeli high-tech is provided by a small startup of a Forbes Under30 list graduate, precisely when the Israeli home front is under attack and the economy is paralyzed.
The artificial intelligence startup, Base44, which serial entrepreneur Maor Shlomo founded with the goal of simplifying website and application building processes using AI – was sold to Israeli internet giant WIX, just half a year after its establishment. The sale deal was signed for an initial sum of approximately $80 million, plus earn-out payments. Shlomo, the sole founder and head of the company, is naturally the almost exclusive beneficiary of the deal. Alongside him is a very small team numbering only 6 employees.
“This acquisition is a significant milestone in Wix’s commitment to changing how people create on the web,” said WIX CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami, upon announcing the sale deal. “Maor and his team at Base44 bring with them breakthrough technology, impressive market penetration and visionary leadership – which naturally connect to our vision,” Abrahami continued, “to enable every user, at any knowledge level, to express their intent – while smart agents handle the actual execution.”
The acquisition of the AI tools developed at the artificial intelligence startup, Base44, allows end users to develop software independently, in simple language and without any prior programming knowledge, and are expected to “significantly expand Wix’s user base worldwide,” according to the company’s assessment.
“The acquisition – a significant milestone in Wix’s commitment to changing how people create on the web.” WIX offices | Photo: WIX
“Base44 enables no-code digital creation with ease, through an intuitive conversational AI experience. This acquisition significantly strengthens Wix’s AI solution suite, and expands the toolkit of smart tools it offers to creators and businesses, strengthens Wix’s AI array and its capabilities to make innovation accessible to creators and businesses worldwide.”
In zero time by Israeli high-tech standards, the startup founded by Shlomo accumulated an impressive customer base and proven market success, including collaborations with companies like eToro and SimilarWeb.
“Wix is probably the only company that can allow us to reach the scale and distribution we aspire to, without harming our development pace and perhaps even accelerating it,” Shlomo said. “Our market is enormous, and it has the potential to replace entire software categories, simply because the system allows people to create software themselves instead of purchasing it,” claimed the CEO and founder of Base44, which is expected to continue operating as an independent unit within WIX.
Young Promise
Maor Shlomo (31) was selected for Forbes’ promising young people list in 2020, when he was only 26 and had already served as CEO-founder of Explorium. The intriguing data startup developed tools that help organizations make accurate predictions based on cross-referencing data between databases and since its establishment in 2017 has completed fundraising totaling $125 million, from leading venture capital funds like Insight Partners and Zeev Venture. With the start of the war, Shlomo left Explorium, enlisted in reserves, and after his discharge founded Base44.
About a month before his selection to the list, Shlomo received a special award from the head of Military Intelligence for breakthrough technology for the intelligence division’s central data mining system, which he created during his military service.
In an interview he gave then to Forbes Israel, he shared that the experience of building the system is what actually led him to establish Explorium – alongside Omer Har (CTO) and Or Tamir (COO) – with the goal of helping organizations automatically find relevant information that can help them answer business questions. “Just as search engines help rank among millions of websites according to a user’s question, that’s what we do for databases,” he described.
The idea is simple – “If data changes the world – we’ll create a situation where people reach the information they need to solve the challenging questions they face,” he explained in the interview. “The platform we developed surfaces, from tens of thousands of databases, the most significant variables for answering the question.”
Shlomo grew up in Haifa and when he was young spent most of his time in scouts. He came to the Intelligence Corps without programming skills, but taught himself to program during his service and created tools that became useful on a daily basis – first among those around him and then among other intelligence teams. This led the 8200 commander to transfer him to serve at 8200’s technology center. Since then, the system for which he won the prestigious award operates in every intelligence arena and continues to impact state security to this day.
