Base44, a Wix-owned AI-powered app development platform, has launched Base1, its first in-house large language model (LLM), to power natural language app development with improved speed, efficiency, and lower costs. The launch comes just a year after Wix acquired the startup for $80 million, signaling its expansion and efforts to reduce reliance on third-party AI models. Base44 aims to strengthen its competitive edge through proprietary data and infrastructure, with founder Maor Shlomo stating that AI model ownership will enable optimization of latency, efficiency, and inference costs, and that the ultimate aim is for Base1 to surpass general-purpose frontier models for app development tasks. Base1 was trained on data gathered from tens of millions of real users, allowing continuous enhancement through customer feedback. The move reflects a broader trend of AI startups building their own models to improve profitability and long-term defensibility in the rapidly growing vibe coding market. Jonathan Userovici, General Partner at venture capital firm Headline, noted that data, distribution, and infrastructure have become the three key pillars of defensibility for AI startups. Competitors include large AI companies like Lovable, Claude Code, and other AI coding tools from xAI.