Wix’s Base44 reaches America’s biggest stage
A once-obscure AI platform makes its Super Bowl debut less than a year after its acquisition.
When the Super Bowl kicks off next month, millions of viewers will watch a 30-second commercial that cost an estimated $8 million to air. Among the automakers, beer brands and consumer giants will be an unexpected entrant: Base44, an AI-powered app-building platform that, barely a year ago, was largely unknown even within the tech industry.
The decision by Wix to place Base44 in the Super Bowl spotlight marks a striking moment in the company’s transformation, and in the speed with which a small, recently acquired startup has moved from early experimentation to mainstream visibility.
Base44 was founded in 2024 by Maor Shlomo and acquired by Wix in June 2025. At the time, it was an ambitious but unproven product aimed at enabling users, including non-developers, to build fully functioning applications using natural language. Less than a year later, it has become central enough to Wix’s strategy to justify one of the most expensive advertising slots in the world.
“Congratulations to Maor Shlomo and the Base44 team on your first Super Bowl ad,” Wix co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami wrote on LinkedIn. “An incredible milestone and a huge moment to put in front of the world.”
Wix president Nor Zohar echoed the sense of acceleration. “When Maor Shlomo first showed me Base44, it was so early and just the start of something special,” he wrote. “Fast forward less than a year: millions of people are building apps with it, and now a Super Bowl ad.”
That speed matters. Wix, long known for steady, subscription-driven growth, has rarely made bold, high-profile bets on breakout products. Base44 has changed that. Within months of the acquisition, Wix placed the startup at the center of its earnings narrative, signaling a strategic shift from incremental platform improvements toward AI-driven reinvention.
By the third quarter of 2025, Wix said Base44 had reached 2 million users, a sevenfold increase since the acquisition closed, and was outperforming internal expectations. The company projected that Base44 would reach $50 million in annual recurring revenue by year-end, with a path toward $100 million thereafter. More than 1,000 new paying subscribers were joining the platform each day.
That growth has come at a cost. Wix acknowledged that it was accelerating marketing and infrastructure investments to support Base44’s expansion, a factor that weighed on margins and contributed to investor unease. Wix shares fell sharply following its third-quarter results, even as management emphasized confidence in the company’s longer-term trajectory.
The campaign, titled “It’s app to you,” is designed to highlight what Wix describes as the “builder’s high,” the moment when users realize they have created a working app themselves, using only natural language. According to Base44, that moment has driven organic adoption across teams and workplaces, as users share what they have built and prompt others to try the platform.
The choice to debut on the Super Bowl stage also comes at a delicate moment for Wix. On Wednesday, the company announced a $2 billion share buyback program, seeking to signal confidence after a prolonged decline in its share price. Investors have grown more cautious toward software companies grappling with the costs and complexity of artificial intelligence, even as AI reshapes product roadmaps across the industry.
