Wix-owned Base44 launches its own AI model as startups chase defensibility

Base44, the vibe-coding platform that Wix acquired for $80 million just a year ago — when it was barely six months old with a team of eight — has started rolling out its own AI model to help users build apps with natural language. The first iteration, Base1, was developed and trained on a dataset generated from tens of millions of real user interactions on the platform.

Founder Maor Shlomo argues that 'training and owning the model as part of our entire stack allows us a lot more optimizations on latency, cost, and efficiency.' The move directly addresses two live AI-industry debates: whether frontier models are best suited for all use cases, and whether businesses built atop someone else's models are truly defensible long-term.

The competitive context is pointed. Rival Lovable, which hit $500M in annualized revenue relying on external LLMs, represents the build-on-top model; Base44 is betting that proprietary data plus owned infrastructure is the more durable path. Headline GP Jonathan Userovici frames data as one of three defensibility ingredients alongside distribution and tech stack.

The broader signal — echoed in r/OpenAI's viral thread 'Why is every AI lab suddenly trying to build their own chips?' (873 upvotes) — is verticalization: as model access becomes gated and expensive, application-layer players are integrating downward. Skeptics question whether a startup-trained model can match frontier quality, and note Shlomo's own caveat that rivals' datasets will grow too. What to watch: whether Base1 actually outperforms frontier models on Base44's use cases, and how many other app-layer startups follow.