Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Base44: 0 to an $80M Exit in 6 Months

22 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:44

Base44's founder built an AI tool that generates web apps from user descriptions after his girlfriend struggled with existing website builders. The company went from idea to an $80 million acquisition by Wix in six months by giving large language models access to databases and user management systems.

Chapters

In 6 months, you went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for $80 million plus to Wix. So how did this start? My girlfriend needed like a website to capture leads, and I tried building that with like one of the tools out there for website building, not an AI-powered one, and it was such a pain trying to do that. I know models can write the code to do exactly what I'm trying to do right now. I know it could be done. It's just, give it the right setting, the right infrastructure so that the LLM has access to a database, maybe to another LLM to build like the app on top of AI, to have some user management, to have all those kinds of things that it needs, but it can translate the user needs to actual code. And that's how Base44 started.