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Base44<\/a>, the vibe coding platform that Wix acquired for $80 million<\/a> just one year ago \u2014 when the company was barely six moths old and had a team of eight \u2014 has started rolling out its own AI model to support its users in creating apps with natural language.<\/p>\n The move comes as the discussion in AI circles has intensified over whether frontier models are best suited for all use cases. A related question is whether businesses built on top of someone else\u2019s models are truly defensible long-term. The latest move of Base44, based in the Bay Area, speaks to both.<\/p>\n While its custom LLM is only just rolling out, Base44 hopes that it will eventually outperform frontier models. According to its founder, Maor Shlomo, \u201ctraining and owning the model as part of [our] entire stack allows us a lot more optimizations on latency, cost, and efficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n At first glance, this could be a way to stay ahead of competitors such as Swedish startup Lovable<\/a>, which reached unicorn status<\/a> in its Series A round last summer and that relies on external LLMs<\/a>. However, Shlomo expects that others will train their own models \u2014 \u201cat least the players that have gotten enough scale and velocity to have enough data.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Jonathan Userovici, a general partner at VC firm Headline \u2014 whose portfolio includes AI companies like Mistral AI, but not Base44 \u2014 data is one of three key ingredients of defensibility for AI startups, alongside distribution and tech stack.\u00a0<\/p>\n The upshot is that players with strong brands are now leaning into their data and infrastructure to increase their defensibility, and Base44 fits that pattern. The company says the first iteration of its LLM, Base1, was developed and trained on a dataset generated from \u201ctens of millions of real user interactions on the platform.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This dataset will keep on growing with the company; but so will its rivals\u2019. The bigger competition may not be vibe-coding startups at all but instead come from frontier AI labs that are getting closer to Base44\u2019s home turf \u2014 Cursor and Grok\u2019s parent company xAI now both belong to SpaceX<\/a>, and Claude Code has become a vibe coding player in its own right.\u00a0<\/p>\n This gives Anthropic and other foundational AI providers access to data and feedback loops they can use to improve models for app creation, but Shlomo thinks specialization gives Base44 a leg up. \u201cModels are progressing, but they\u2019ll stay very general in what they can do,\u201d he predicted.<\/p>\n Userovici, for his part, cautioned against underestimating frontier models, citing the example of the legal tech startup Harvey, which abandoned plans to train its own model. He doesn\u2019t expect applied AI companies to become frontier labs en masse but frames Base44\u2019s move in a broader context \u2014 one in which inference costs have become a meaningful part of the equation.<\/p>\n That cost pressure, Userovici says, has driven change that enterprise customers are now demanding. \u201cThey don\u2019t 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\u2019t skyrocket while maintaining the same or similar performance across the majority of use cases.\u201d<\/p>\n Enterprise companies still are a minority among the audience of the vibe coding platforms, but they represent a growing share of platform revenue, and users of all sizes are starting to express concerns over the cost of using AI. Base44\u2019s decision to develop its own LLM stemmed from multiple factors, but cost reduction is likely among the benefits.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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\u2019re getting, and is going to be faster and cheaper for customers eventually than using the frontier models like Opus,\u201d Shlomo said.<\/p>\n As for Base44 itself, cost reduction isn\u2019t as clear cut. In a press release, the company explained that \u201cownership of the model gives Base44 direct control over compute and inference spend, expected to result in a structurally stronger margin profile over time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Even with a delayed payoff, improved margins would be good news for Base44\u2019s parent company, which recently announced it would lay off 20% of its workforce<\/a>. In contrast, Base44 has been growing in headcount since the acquisition \u2014 and announced it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue<\/a> a few months ago.<\/p>\n That\u2019s still less than Lovable, which said it hit $500 million in ARR earlier this month<\/a>. But Shlomo is betting that the \u201chuge engineering effort\u201d to develop Base1 will cement Base44\u2019s positioning as the \u201conly vertically integrated vibe-coding application \u2014 meaning, in Userovici\u2019s terms, a player that owns its distribution, data, and infrastructure all at once.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n