Wix started because its founders found building their own website too hard. Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan built a tool in Tel Aviv where you drag text, photos and buttons onto a page and hit publish. Small businesses, photographers and bands signed up by the millions, most for free, and some paid for premium plans. When Wix listed on Nasdaq in November 2013, it had already rebuilt its product once, moving off Flash as phones took over the web.

Websites Without Code

The three founders started Wix in 2006. The first version ran on Adobe Flash, which made rich pages easy but did not work on the iPhone. In 2012 Wix moved to HTML5 so its sites would load on any device. The business model was freemium: build a site for free, then pay to use your own domain, remove Wix ads or run a store. The bet was that a small share of a huge free audience would pay.

A Newer Kind of Builder

Wix priced its IPO at $16.50 a share in November 2013. It added online stores, bookings and payments, and its paid subscribers kept growing. In 2025 Wix bought Base44, a startup that builds apps from plain-language prompts. In the first half of 2026 its shares fell 56 percent as investors worried that AI tools could replace drag-and-drop builders. Wix responded with a $2 billion buyback. It still trades on Nasdaq under WIX.

Cover: Noah Supervising Construction of the Ark, Sir Nicolas Dorigny. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for building the ark (building it yourself).