Wix shares have more than doubled in two months. Base44 is driving the comeback
Wix remains down 18.7% this year and is still grappling with heavy AI-related costs, but its rapidly growing Base44 business is giving investors a reason to rethink the company's value.
Wix shares have staged a remarkable recovery over the past two months, more than doubling from their June low as investors appear to be reassessing the potential of the Israeli software company’s increasingly AI-driven business.
The stock closed at a multi-year low of $40.43 on June 23, 2026, but has since roughly doubled. Wix now has a market capitalization of approximately $3.43 billion.
The rebound is striking because the stock is still 18.7% below its level at the start of 2026, and because the company's aggressive push into AI has so far come with a significant financial cost.
Base44, the AI application-building company Wix acquired, has become its fastest-growing business. But the cost of running and marketing the platform helped push Wix deeper into the red earlier this year, even as overall revenue continued to rise.
Three days ago, Base44 founder Maor Shlomo said the business had surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, just five months after reaching $100 million. Wix had disclosed a $150 million annualized revenue figure in May.
The growth has been extraordinary for a business that Wix acquired only months after its launch in 2025. Base44 allows users to build applications through natural-language conversations with AI, a category often described as "vibe coding."
The latest milestone also comes after a difficult period for Wix. In the second quarter, the company reported a $76.4 million net loss, compared with a $57.7 million profit a year earlier. It had already recorded a $57.5 million loss in the first quarter.
The deterioration followed a restructuring that eliminated roughly 1,000 jobs, reducing Wix's workforce to approximately 4,300. The company attributed the restructuring partly to higher costs caused by the strengthening shekel and to changes brought by the rapid adoption of AI.
Base44 has added another layer of expense. The platform carries substantial computing costs and requires significant marketing investment as competition in AI coding intensifies. Wix's sales and marketing expenses jumped 67% year over year to $173 million in the second quarter.
Yet the market's reaction has increasingly focused on what Base44 could become rather than what it is costing Wix today.
Base44 has been moving toward greater control of its technology stack, including the development of Base1, its own large language model. Wix expects the move to substantially reduce computing and inference costs, which have been among the largest expenses associated with the company's AI products.
Wix expects Base44's gross margin to reach roughly 60% in the second half of 2026, compared with levels close to break-even earlier in the year.
The company has said it plans to reinvest much of those savings into marketing rather than immediately allowing them to flow through to profits. The strategy is to use lower AI infrastructure costs to accelerate Base44's growth and capture market share.
