The lawyers finished the Base44 paperwork on a Thursday night. The signing was set for Friday morning. That same Friday morning, the war with Iran broke out. Maor Shlomo signed anyway.
That detail is the whole story in miniature. A guy in Israel, between reserve duty call-ups, sells a company he started as a side project, and the missiles are a scheduling problem.
The setup
Shlomo was not a kid with a dream and a laptop. He had already co-founded Explorium, a data analytics company that raised a total of $127 million, capped by a $75 million Series C led by Insight Partners, per TechCrunch. He left, did reserve duty after October 7, and came back restless.
Base44 started because his girlfriend needed a website for her art business and he was helping the Israeli Scouts with some software. He kept hitting the same wall. As he told CEO Insider, "Both times I realized, 'LLMs should be able to build this.'"
