Vibe coding startups face a big copycat risk, says a founder who sold his company for $80 million

• A vibe coding startup founder says vibe coding tools are easy to clone.
• Startups built only on prompting an LLM or light fine-tuning could struggle to defend their business.
• Maor Shlomo's comments come as vibe coding platforms continue to gain traction.

Maor Shlomo, who built a vibe coding startup and sold it for about $80 million, has a warning for the fast-growing vibe coding market: These tools are easy to clone, and that makes them fragile businesses.

The founder and CEO of Base44 said in an episode of "20VC" podcast published Monday that "it's relatively easy to create a vibe coding tool."

Vibe coding tools enable anyone to build software by simply prompting AI. But Shlomo said the part users 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 users. In June, it was acquired by Wix, a web development company, for about $80 million.

Wix said in its second-quarter results in August that Base44 was on track to reach $40 to $50 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025.

Shlomo said on the podcast that startups that rely on clever prompting or fine-tuning an existing LLM could struggle to defend their business. "It's going to be hard to have a moat," he said.

What is difficult to replicate is the underlying infrastructure behind a tool, such as a built-in database, authentication system, user management, and analytics, he added.

"It's very, very, very hard to create a platform that could help people build products they'll actually use, that are functional, that are complex enough for real-world use cases," Shlomo said.

"For that, you need many layers of integrations. You need 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 get to something that you're going to use 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 spending shows 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 spending data. Replit ranked third in total spend, behind OpenAI and Anthropic.

"Vibe coding is no mere consumer trend — 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 big 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 biggest 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.