WIX

Back in 2006, Avishai Abrahami was trying to build a website for a different startup he was working on. It was miserable.

You either hired a developer or fought with clunky tools that assumed you knew HTML. He figured millions of small business owners hit the same wall.

So he teamed up with his brother Nadav Abrahami and a third co-founder, Giora Kaplan, and they built Wix in Tel Aviv.

The early version ran on Flash, which sounds ancient now but was the only way to do smooth drag-and-drop design in a browser back then. The pitch was dead simple.

Drag boxes around. Drop in your text and photos.

Hit publish. No code, no developer, no fighting with templates.

Investors were not exactly lining up. The first real believer was Mangrove Capital Partners, a small fund in Luxembourg run by Mark Tluszcz.

Mangrove kept backing them through the lean years. That bet eventually returned hundreds of times its money.

Wix bled cash for years before the freemium model clicked. Then it clicked hard.

Wix is free to use. That is the whole hook.

You can build an entire website without paying a cent. But the free version puts Wix ads on your site, gives you a clumsy Wix-branded web address, and locks the features that matter to a real business.

Want to remove the ads? Pay.

Want your own domain like yourbakery.com? Pay.

Want to take online payments, sell products, or book appointments? Pay.

The free tier is basically a very generous free trial that never ends, designed to get you hooked before you need to look professional.

Most users never pay. That is fine.

The ones who do convert into monthly or yearly subscriptions, and a small business that builds its whole online presence on Wix tends to stay for years. Switching is a pain once your site lives there.

So Wix makes money the boring, beautiful way. Recurring subscriptions that renew while you sleep.

The core product is the Wix Editor, the drag-and-drop canvas where you build your site by moving things around. For people who do not even want to do that, Wix ADI builds a starter site for you after asking a few questions.

Then there is Velo, a developer platform layered on top that lets people who do know code add custom functionality. It is Wix trying to win back the developers who used to mock it.

Wix Studio is the newer pro-grade product aimed at agencies and designers who build sites for clients. On top of the builder sit the money-makers.

Wix Stores for e-commerce, Wix Bookings for appointments, and Wix Payments for taking money. Each one is an upsell that turns a free website into a paid business tool.

Wix grew on two engines. The first was volume.

Pour millions into getting people to try the free product, then convert a slice of them into paying customers. The math works when the free tier costs little to run and the paying users stick around for years.

The second engine was advertising, and Wix went big and loud. In 2015 they ran a Super Bowl ad stuffed with washed-up celebrities like Brett Favre and Terrell Owens building Wix sites for their post-football side hustles.

It was funny, it was everywhere, and it made a developer tool feel like something your aunt could use. Wix kept buying Super Bowl spots for years.

The other quiet move was going global early. Wix translated the product into dozens of languages and chased small businesses in markets the big American players ignored.

By the time competitors noticed, Wix already had tens of millions of users outside the US.

The knock on Wix has always been the same. Power users and developers look down on it.

The sites can be slow, the code under the hood is messy, and for years SEO experts warned that Google struggled to rank Wix sites well. Wix spent enormous effort fixing the speed and search problems, but the reputation stuck around longer than the actual issues.

The bigger threat now is AI. If anyone can describe a website in a sentence and have it built instantly, the whole drag-and-drop interface that made Wix special starts to look slow.

Wix has leaned hard into AI tools to stay ahead, but so has every competitor. Squarespace, Shopify, and a wave of AI-native builders are all fighting for the same small business owner.

The race never really ends.

The hero of the Wix funding story is Mangrove Capital Partners, the Luxembourg fund that backed them early and held on through years of losses. When Wix went public, Mangrove reportedly turned a few million dollars into well over a billion.

It is one of the great European venture returns.

Other backers along the way included Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark, DAG Ventures, and Insight Partners. Wix raised about $58.5 million in private funding before going public on NASDAQ in November 2013.

The IPO raised around $127 million and the stock has been publicly traded ever since.