SAN FRANCISCO — Base44, an AI company based in the Bay Area, launched its custom artificial intelligence model, Base1, on June 29, 2026. The company stated that ownership of the model offers direct control over compute and inference expenditures, and that this direct control is expected to lead to a stronger margin profile over time. Base44 reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue concurrently with the launch.

"Training and owning the model as part of our entire stack allows us a lot more optimizations on latency, cost, and efficiency," said Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44. "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." The Base1 model was trained using a dataset derived from tens of millions of real user interactions on the Base44 platform.

Jonathan Userovici, a general partner at the venture capital firm Headline, said, "They don't necessarily see a [return on investment] when using the latest models for all use cases, so an entire infrastructure is being set up to do orchestration and optimization to select the right models for them so that costs don't skyrocket while maintaining the same or similar performance across the majority of use cases." Headline's portfolio includes Mistral AI, but not Base44.

Wix acquired Base44 for $80 million on June 29, 2025, when Base44 was six months old and had a team of eight employees. Wix announced a layoff of 20% of its workforce on June 29, 2026. Base44 has reported an increase in its headcount since its acquisition by Wix.