Base44 becomes Wix’s surprise growth engine with 2 million users, $50M ARR
Five months after the acquisition, the AI coding platform dominates Wix’s Q3 narrative.
Five months after acquiring Base44, a young startup enabling natural-language coding, Wix is finding that the bet it made last summer is reshaping the entire company far faster than expected. In its third-quarter results released on Wednesday, the Israeli website-building platform placed Base44 at the center of its earnings narrative, a notable shift for a business that has historically defined itself by steady subscription growth rather than breakout product bets.
Wix said Base44, founded by Maor Shlomo, has already reached 2 million users, a sevenfold increase since June when the deal closed. The product, which enables developers and non-developers to build applications using ChatGPT-style prompts, is not only scaling quickly but also outperforming every financial benchmark Wix set during the acquisition. Base44 is now expected to reach $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by year-end, with Wix projecting a path toward $100 million in the foreseeable future.
For a company of Wix’s scale, such rapid adoption is unusually fast. Executives now acknowledge that Base44’s ascent is forcing a strategic reprioritization, and investors are watching closely. Wix’s stock fell more than 15% at the market open, dragging its market cap below $6 billion and pushing its year-to-date decline to roughly 50%. The selloff reflects not the performance of Base44 but the costs associated with absorbing it: Wix is accelerating marketing and infrastructure investments to meet demand, lifting operating expenses and weighing on profitability.
“Base44’s top-line growth is exceeding expectations,” said Lior Shemesh, Wix’s CFO, noting that the platform’s share of its category has climbed from the low single digits to more than 10% since June. “To capture this better-than-anticipated demand, we are accelerating our marketing investments.” The company added that more than one thousand new paying subscribers are now joining Base44 every day.
CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami framed Base44 not as a side project but as an evolution of Wix’s mission. “Our goal has always been to give people the power to access advanced technology without the barriers of complexity,” he said. “With Base44, we’re bringing the next generation of AI and natural-language development to applications.”
That mission now carries financial consequences. Wix is required to make additional acquisition-related payments tied to Base44’s performance, obligations that are likely to grow as the startup continues to exceed targets.
Still, Wix signaled confidence by raising its full-year bookings guidance, driven by both Base44’s outperformance and stronger-than-expected customer cohorts in Wix’s core business. Q3 revenue rose 14% year-on-year, with bookings growing at a similar pace.
The broader question is how far Base44 can carry Wix at a time when AI-driven tools are forcing tech companies to reallocate capital, rethink product roadmaps and confront new competitive pressures. For Wix, a company accustomed to incremental product expansion, Base44 has become something closer to a second engine, one delivering immediate growth but also demanding heavy investment.
Whether investors will back that strategy remains unclear. But five months after acquisition, Wix finds itself in a position few inside the company likely imagined: its future trajectory increasingly defined by a startup that, until recently, did not exist inside its walls.
