Nadav Abrahami is the lesser known founder of successful Internet company Wix.com (Nasdaq: WIX). His brother Avishai is the chairperson and CEO of the company, and Nir Zohar has become its face in the Israeli media. It was Nadav Abrahami, however, who sketched the general idea behind Wix: a simple online tool for creating websites. The aspiration was to build an editing interface that would give great results even for people without developed graphic design abilities or advanced knowledge of programming.
Today, after nearly twenty years at Wix, Nadav Abrahami is upping sticks and leaving to set up another company by the name of Dazl with a team of 30 people from Wix and financial support from the company and its founders. The new company is a sort of spin-off from Wix. The aim is to become part of the burgeoning scene of vibe coding, generative artificial intelligence technology that enables any user to create an app, a website, or a cloud-based service, by means of simple text instructions.
Abrahami is joined by Assaf Sagy, formerly the most senior Israeli at TikTok and its head of Global Gaming. The pair are currently raising $10 million in a round led by a new Israeli VC firm called 40RTY Partners, which counts among its investors Avishai Abrahami and Nir Zohar, Mellanox founder Eyal Waldman, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman, and WalkMe founder Rafael Sweary.
The new fund, which is also entering into media radar range for the first time today, is mostly managed by people with a connection to Wix, such as former Mangrove partners Roy Saar and Itay Gil Asulin; Eyal Ben Yaakov, formerly with Ernst & Young, who advised Wix in its IPO; marketing person Ariel Margalith; and investor relations manager Veronika Pavlovich. Other investors in the firm are Wix itself and Eyal Waldman’s Waldo Holdings.
Wix did buy Maor Shlomo’s Base44, a pioneer of vibe coding, for $80 million, but in Abrahami’s opinion there is room for many more companies in this field. Base44 itself reports very rapid growth in users and revenue, and Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami predicted that its annual revenue rate would rise from a few million dollars at the time of the acquisition in June to $40-50 million by the end of the year. At the same time, Base44 has been sharply criticized for its weak data security, a worry, but not such as to be a barrier for small businesses, which form the vast majority of Wix’s customers.
Vibe coding, meaning a product that enables people to build apps and websites using simple, unmediated instructions in natural language, is perhaps one of the fastest growing fields in the world. Base44, US company Windsurf, and Swedish company Lovable time and time again present astonishing growth.
Dazl’s founders agree with the claim that the first wave of generative tools for building websites and apps enabled almost anyone to create simple prototypes. As a result, marketing people and designers became independent product builders, without the need for development teams.
"But along with the excitement also came frustration," the company says. "The existing tools almost never succeed in providing a full visual or functional result. Users have to run dozens of prompts, and many are left with partial products instead a product ready for launch. Dazl is programmed to provide greater precision in interpreting prompts, and thus reduce the number of rounds of trial and error in communications with AI. In addition, it ensures that the model won’t ‘lose context,’ leading to fewer errors, and a dramatic reduction in user frustration."
"It’s hard to convey all of our ideas using prompts - text-based instructions," says Abrahami. "Sometimes, the best way of conveying a particular idea is through visual representation. In addition, there’s a new generation of creators who don’t read code, and who need a set of tools that will make what happens with the code accessible and allow it to be edited and communicated. There is decisive importance in the construction of an environment in which moving one piece of code or one factor change the entire context."
Why not exploit the fact that Wix bought Base44 and merge their team with yours?
"What distinguishes us from them lies in the ability to edit the code visually and make AI-based applications accessible to the user. We felt that this journey had to be made on the outside. It’s the journey of a startup, but one that will require interactions with Wix, which is also an investor in the company."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 8, 2025.
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