Maor Shlomo, who built a vibe coding startup and sold it for about $80 million, has a warning for the quick-growing vibe coding market: These tools are straightforward to clone, and that builds them fragile businesses.
The founder and CEO of Base44 declared in an episode of “20VC” podcast published Monday that “it’s relatively straightforward to create a vibe coding tool.”
Vibe coding tools enable anyone to build software by simply prompting AI. But Shlomo declared the part utilizers see — the magic moment when an interface appears — is the easiest piece to replicate.
“Every feature that we put out, we know that’s going to take either a few weeks or a few months for competitor to copy,” he added.
Shlomo founded Base44 as a bootstrapped project that quickly hit hundreds of thousands of utilizers. In June, it was acquired by Wix, a web development company, for about $80 million.
Wix declared in its second-quarter results in August that Base44 was on track to reach $40 to $50 million in annual recurring revenue by the finish of 2025.
Shlomo declared on the podcast that startups that rely on clever prompting or fine-tuning an existing LLM could struggle to deffinish their business. “It’s going to be hard to have a moat,” he declared.
What is difficult to replicate is the underlying infrastructure behind a tool, such as a built-in database, authentication system, utilizer management, and analytics, he added.
“It’s very, very, very hard to create a platform that could assist people build products they’ll actually utilize, that are functional, that are complex enough for real-world utilize cases,” Shlomo declared.
“For that, you required many layers of integrations. You required to adapt and tune the agent to handle very complex projects,” he added. “It’s going to take you, like, hundreds or thousands of prompts to receive to something that you’re going to utilize day-to-day.”
The rise of vibecoding tools
Shlomo’s comments come as vibecoding tools continue to gain traction in the tech world, with startups and investors pouring serious money into them.
A recent a16z analysis of startup spfinishing reveals a noticeable shift toward vibecoding platforms. According to the October report, Replit, Cursor, Loveable, and Emergent were among the top 50 AI-native applications based on spfinishing data. Replit ranked third in total spfinish, behind OpenAI and Anthropic.
“Vibe coding is no mere consumer trfinish — it has landed in workplaces,” wrote the three a16z staff who authored the report.
The findings came from an a16z partnership with Mercury, a fintech that provides banking and payment tools to startups. The analysis draws on transaction data from more than 200,000 Mercury customers between June and August.
Investors are also betting large on vibecoding. Replit announced in September that it raised a $250 million round at a $3 billion valuation, nearly tripling its valuation since its last round in 2023. Lovable closed a $200 million Series A in July that valued it at $1.8 billion, according to PitchBook. Cursor, one of the largegest players in the vibe coding space, announced earlier this month that it had raised a $2.3 billion round at a $29.3 billion valuation.
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