Maor Shlomo, a 32-year-old Israeli entrepreneur from Haifa, first became a local tech star after founding Base44 on his own and selling it to Wix within a year for $92 million, including $18 million in cash. He said in interviews that he built the company after a long reserve-duty stretch during the Gaza war, while traveling in Thailand. Base44, an AI system for building apps and software from text prompts, is now Wix’s biggest growth engine and, for some, a lifeline for the company.
Before Base44, however, Shlomo had founded another highly watched startup, Explorium. The company was once valued at a peak of $513 million during the pandemic boom, after raising more than $120 million from leading venture firms including Insight Partners and Zeev Ventures. In 2020, Globes ranked it fifth among Israel’s ten most promising startups, alongside companies that later sold for billions or became major growth stories.
Shlomo’s earlier career began in Unit 8200, where he started in a non-technical role before moving into machine learning work. He later built Flow, a machine-learning system that combined data from different sources into one integrated picture, and a senior Israeli tech figure said, “Every soldier who passed through 8200 used his system.” Explorium was meant to bring that military capability to the civilian market, helping banks enrich lending data and retailers predict customer churn or price products more accurately.
The company’s largest round came in May 2021, when Insight Partners led a $75 million financing at the $513 million valuation. One investor later said that round was “not related to the company’s financial performance” and left Explorium priced too high for years afterward. The market shifted in early 2023 after ChatGPT’s launch and the AI boom, while higher interest rates forced many tech buyers to cut spending. Explorium also faced rising competition from companies such as Salesforce and ZoomInfo, and critics said it never achieved product-market fit.
Shlomo left during the war, after being called up for reserve duty when the fighting began, and never returned. People familiar with the company say he and the board agreed on his departure and named CTO Omer Har as CEO, though Har says he was appointed three months earlier, in July 2023. Since then, Explorium has shrunk from 180 employees in 2022 to about 80 today, according to LinkedIn, but it has tried to revive growth with an AI sales product called Vibe Prospecting. That tool, marketed as a chatbot and AI agent for sales teams, has helped generate deals worth more than $10 million, though investors remain cautious and the company has not publicly discussed the strategy.
