AI-powered vibe coding platform Base44 has launched Base1, its first proprietary large language model (LLM), marking a significant shift in its growth strategy. The rollout comes as AI startups increasingly seek to build defensible businesses by owning more of their technology stack instead of relying on third-party models.
Base44, which Wix purchased for $80 million in 2025, enables customers to generate production-ready applications from natural language prompts. Before the release of Base1, the firm relied on external AI models. Now it plans to provide a quicker, less expensive, and more personalized app-building experience.
In line with the launch, founder and CEO Maor Shlomo, explained, “We want to get a model that is going to be more aligned to what we think is the right thing, is going to be more optimized to what we see users like in terms of the results we’re getting, and is going to be faster and cheaper for customers eventually than using the frontier models like Opus.”
Base44 believes the ownership of the model will increase its profitability over time by securing direct access to computing power.
This approach is part of a broader trend in the industry, where AI companies are seeking a viable business model amid rising infrastructure costs. He also noted that specialized AI models will continue to outperform general-purpose models in niche use cases such as application generation. Critics caution that competitors with enough scale can eventually build similar proprietary models using their own customer data.
Base1 was trained using tens of millions of user interactions, collected through the platform. Such a unique dataset serves as the core of the company's competitive advantage. Exclusively owning data, infrastructure, and distribution channels is increasingly becoming the three-part foundation of successful AI companies.
Base44 is competing in an emerging market that consists of players like Lovable, Replit, and other AI-driven coding apps. However, major AI research labs are also getting more deeply engaged in software development, adding more pressure on specialized application developers.
Base44 claims its vertical integration can provide a competitive edge. Recently, the firm exceeded $100 million in ARR and sees further investments in Base1 as a way to consolidate its position.
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