Fiverr

Fiverr was founded in Tel Aviv in 2010 by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger. The company's founding premise was deliberately simple: a two-sided marketplace in which every service listing — called a "gig" — was priced at exactly five dollars, democratizing access to creative and technical freelance work and eliminating the friction of price negotiation. The name Fiverr directly references this original $5 price point, though the platform has long since moved to variable pricing across a wide range.

Fiverr's global headquarters are located at 14 Hamered Street, Tel Aviv, a central address in the city's commercial tech district. The company also maintains offices in New York City, which serves as the primary North American commercial hub, as well as smaller presences in Chicago and several European cities. All core product, engineering, and executive leadership functions remain based in Tel Aviv.

Fiverr listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FVRR in June 2019, with an IPO priced at $21 per share that raised approximately $111 million. In May 2021, during the peak of the pandemic-era demand surge, FVRR reached an all-time high of $323 per share. As of late 2025, the market capitalization has contracted to approximately $500–700 million, reflecting a broader post-pandemic normalization of demand for freelance services and intensifying structural pressure from generative AI tools that substitute for categories the platform once dominated.

Fiverr employs approximately 600–700 people globally, following a series of workforce reductions between 2022 and 2024. Roughly 300–350 of those employees — approximately 50% of the global total — are based in Israel, concentrated in R&D, product, data engineering, and machine learning. The remaining workforce is distributed primarily across New York, Chicago, and European offices, focused on commercial, marketing, and customer success functions.

The core offering is a SaaS two-sided marketplace that connects independent freelancers (sellers) with businesses and individuals (buyers) seeking on-demand services across more than 700 categories, including graphic design, copywriting, software development, digital marketing, video editing, and music production. The single biggest strategic event of the past 12 months has been the company's aggressive AI pivot — specifically the 2024 launches of Fiverr Go, a platform allowing freelancers to build and monetize personalized AI models trained on their own work, and Fiverr Neo, an AI-powered conversational matching tool for buyers.

Fiverr is not a subsidiary. It operates as an independent publicly traded company and has itself made several acquisitions: AND CO in 2017 (a business management tool for freelancers), Working Not Working in 2021 (a creative talent marketplace), and Stoke Talent in 2022 (an extended workforce management platform for enterprise HR and procurement teams), at an undisclosed price estimated by analysts at between $50 million and $100 million.

Fiverr's primary product line is its eponymous Fiverr Marketplace, a transactional platform where sellers publish structured service listings ("gigs") with predefined packages and prices, and buyers browse, filter, and purchase directly without negotiating. The marketplace spans categories from logo design and blog writing to app development, SEO audits, and voice-over recordings. Fiverr Pro, the vetted upper tier of the marketplace, launched in 2017, constitutes a separate curated catalog of hand-screened sellers.

The domain-specific problem Fiverr solves is high transaction-cost discovery and trust-building in the fragmented global market for project-based skilled labor. Before standardized gig marketplaces, a small business seeking a freelance web developer had to post a job, evaluate proposals, negotiate rates, draft a contract, and manage payment disputes manually. Fiverr abstracts all of that through a standardized package format, publicly visible ratings and reviews, a built-in escrow payment system, and a dispute resolution layer.

Fiverr's buyer base spans multiple segments. The vast majority of transactions come from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and individual entrepreneurs — typically marketing managers, startup founders, content creators, and product managers who need short-burst deliverables without the overhead of employment or retainer contracts. Fiverr Pro addresses mid-market and larger companies that prioritize verified quality. Stoke Talent, prior to its commercial sunset in 2024, was explicitly targeted at enterprise HR directors and procurement teams managing extended workforces across Fortune 500 companies.

Fiverr's primary sales motion is self-serve: buyers create a free account, browse the marketplace using Fiverr's search and recommendation engine, and complete transactions without any human sales involvement from Fiverr. Fiverr Pro historically introduced a light sales-assisted layer for enterprise onboarding, and Stoke Talent required a traditional enterprise sales cycle with dedicated account executives. The AI products — Fiverr Go and Fiverr Neo — are also largely self-serve in their onboarding.

Fiverr's revenue model is commission-based (a take rate): sellers are charged approximately 20% of each transaction, while buyers are charged an additional service fee of approximately 5.5% on purchases under $40, scaling down on larger orders. The company's blended take rate, which management disclosed in 2024, stands at approximately 34%. Full-year 2023 revenue was $361 million, and Fiverr achieved positive Adjusted EBITDA for the first time on a sustained basis during that fiscal year. The company guided 2024 revenue in the range of $370–380 million.

Fiverr's technical moat is its proprietary behavioral dataset accumulated from over five million annual transactions — seller delivery patterns, buyer repeat-purchase behavior, quality-signaling correlations, and pricing elasticity data by category. This dataset powers the Gig Rank algorithm, the recommendation engine, and the anti-fraud systems. In 2024, Fiverr leveraged this data to fine-tune large language models for Fiverr Neo's matching logic and Fiverr Go's personal AI model generation. The engineering stack, as documented in Fiverr's engineering blog, includes Python, React, Java microservices, AWS infrastructure, Elasticsearch for search, Kafka for event streaming, and Spark for large-scale batch processing.

Fiverr's Israel-based engineering organization works day-to-day on core marketplace feature development, search relevance tuning, seller-ranking algorithm improvements, anti-fraud and trust-and-safety systems, data pipeline infrastructure on Spark and Kafka, and the expanding suite of AI products including Fiverr Neo and Fiverr Go. The ML team in Tel Aviv has grown in relative headcount share since 2023 as AI products became the primary growth vector.

Fiverr Marketplace, launched at the company's founding in 2010, is the flagship product and the source of the overwhelming majority of revenue. Originally limited to $5 listings, the marketplace evolved to allow tiered packages (Basic, Standard, Premium) by 2014, and gig prices now commonly range from $5 to $5,000 or more for high-demand technical services. As of 2024, the marketplace hosts over 700 service categories, from logo design and explainer video production to blockchain development and machine learning consulting.

Fiverr Pro, introduced in 2017, is the hand-vetted premium tier of the same marketplace. Sellers applying to Fiverr Pro undergo a manual review by Fiverr's curation team and must demonstrate portfolio quality, communication professionalism, and delivery reliability. Pro sellers command premium prices and display a distinctive Pro badge. Fiverr has positioned Pro as the answer to enterprise buyers who found the standard marketplace too variable in quality.

Fiverr Business — launched in 2021 and later unified commercially under the Fiverr Pro brand — was a subscription product ($149/year at its peak pricing) designed for teams that needed to manage multiple freelancer relationships, with features including shared team workspaces, budget management, consolidated invoicing, and a dedicated success manager. It targeted marketing operations teams, creative agencies, and product organizations in growth-stage companies.

Stoke Talent, acquired in 2022 for an undisclosed amount estimated in the range of $50 million to $100 million, was an enterprise Extended Workforce Management (EWM) platform designed to help HR and procurement teams at large organizations track, pay, and ensure compliance for all their external workers — freelancers, contractors, and staffing agency placements — from a single system of record. Fiverr wound down the standalone commercial offering of Stoke Talent in 2024, integrating certain technologies into the core platform while discontinuing the separate enterprise SaaS product.

Fiverr Go, launched in 2024, is the company's most strategically significant new product in several years. It allows professional freelancers to train personalized AI models on their own creative output — giving buyers the option to purchase AI-generated content stylistically mimicking a specific Fiverr seller. Fiverr positions this as an AI monetization tool for freelancers rather than a replacement, directly addressing the existential threat that generative AI poses to the seller community.

Fiverr Neo, introduced during 2023–2024, is an AI-powered conversational interface that allows buyers to describe their project in natural language and receive curated seller recommendations, rather than relying on keyword search. Fiverr uses NLP and retrieval-augmented generation approaches in Neo's underlying architecture, though detailed model specifications have not been publicly disclosed.

Fiverr achieved SOC 2 Type II certification, confirmed by at least 2022, which enabled the company to satisfy the compliance requirements of enterprise buyers in regulated industries. The platform does not have a formally published integration on the AWS Marketplace or Salesforce AppExchange, though Fiverr's API is available to select partners for programmatic gig discovery.

Fiverr's most direct and best-funded competitor is Upwork, traded on NASDAQ under the ticker UPWK. Upwork's model differs structurally: it is optimized for longer-term hourly engagements between buyers and freelancers, with a heavier emphasis on ongoing working relationships rather than discrete fixed-price deliverables. Upwork's 2023 full-year revenue was approximately $689 million — roughly 1.9 times Fiverr's $361 million. Upwork also operates the Upwork Enterprise product for large-scale managed service programs, putting it in more direct competition with Stoke Talent's former positioning than with Fiverr's core marketplace.

Toptal is a private competitor that occupies the ultra-premium segment of the market, claiming to accept only the top 3% of applicants through a rigorous multi-stage screening process. Toptal operates purely through enterprise sales, charges premium rates well above both Fiverr Pro and Upwork, and focuses on software engineers, designers, and financial consultants rather than the full breadth of creative categories. Because Toptal does not publish revenue, direct comparisons are difficult, but it reportedly employs fewer than 500 internal staff while maintaining a network of thousands of screened freelancers.

Generative AI tools — including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Midjourney, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Adobe Firefly — represent a structural headwind rather than a direct marketplace competitor. These tools do not connect buyers to human freelancers; instead, they substitute for freelance output in categories such as basic copywriting, logo ideation, image generation, and translation. Fiverr disclosed in its 2022 and 2023 annual reports (Form 20-F filings with the SEC) that AI-generated content substitution is a material risk to its business model, particularly for entry-level gig categories.

Fiverr has not appeared in a Gartner Magic Quadrant, as Gartner does not publish a formal Magic Quadrant for freelance marketplace platforms. Forrester Research acknowledged Fiverr Business as an emerging player in the Contingent Workforce Management segment in 2022, though it was not included in a formal Forrester Wave report.

Fiverr's pricing is positioned as free-tier-driven and mid-market. Buyer registration is free, with fees applied only at the point of transaction. Fiverr Pro carries implicit premium pricing on the seller side, but remains substantially more accessible to buyers than Toptal's enterprise-contract model. Fiverr has historically pursued a growth-over-margin strategy, though the post-2022 shift to Adjusted EBITDA profitability signals a rebalancing toward unit economics.

Fiverr's most significant publicly reported partnership in recent years was a 2021 integration with Microsoft Teams, which embedded Fiverr's gig discovery functionality directly into the Teams environment for small business users. Additionally, in 2022, Fiverr and LinkedIn Learning announced a co-marketing arrangement directing LinkedIn learners toward Fiverr's seller community, though neither company disclosed financial terms.

Fiverr's trajectory in 2024–2025 is one of active stabilization rather than growth acceleration. Revenue growth, which exceeded 60% year-over-year in 2021 during the pandemic surge, has slowed to single digits. Management's stated strategic priority is AI product development and increasing take rate rather than adding new marketplace volume. The company has not been acquired and has not announced a pending transaction, though acquisition speculation — including reported conversations involving LinkedIn's parent Microsoft and other technology conglomerates — appeared in financial media in 2023 and 2024 without confirmation from any party.

Fiverr's sole Israeli office is at 14 Hamered Street, Tel Aviv, situated in the commercial corridor near the Tel Aviv Port and the Azrieli transportation hub. The company has not operated additional offices in Herzliya, Haifa, Ramat Gan, Beer Sheva, or any other Israeli city. The Tel Aviv office serves as both global headquarters and the primary engineering campus, consolidating all Israel-based functions under one roof.

Approximately 300–350 of Fiverr's 600–700 global employees are based in Israel, representing around 50% of the total headcount despite Israel being a single location among many. The Israeli office is home to the vast majority of the R&D organization — backend engineers, frontend engineers, data engineers, machine learning engineers, and site reliability engineers — as well as the product management function, UX and product design teams, data analysts, and BI specialists. Finance, legal, and some executive functions are split between Tel Aviv and New York.

Fiverr underwent significant headcount reductions in Israel between 2022 and 2024. The first round, in June 2022, eliminated approximately 10% of global headcount — roughly 80 positions, with a proportional impact on the Tel Aviv office. A second reduction followed in 2023, again in the range of 10%, and further optimization in 2024 brought the global figure to its current approximate level of 600–700. The Tel Aviv office location was not relocated during this period, though office floor space utilization was reportedly reduced according to coverage in Israeli business media including Calcalist and Globes.

Both founders of Fiverr are Israeli. Micha Kaufman, who serves as CEO and remains the most visible public face of the company, was born and educated in Israel. Shai Wininger, the co-founder who departed the company in 2015, is also Israeli and subsequently co-founded Lemonade (NYSE: LMND) alongside Daniel Schreiber in 2015. Senior technical leaders at Fiverr Israel have predominantly been recruited from within the Israeli tech ecosystem, including graduates of Tel Aviv University, the Technion, and Hebrew University, as well as alumni of IDF technological units — though Fiverr has not publicly disclosed specific military unit pipelines in its corporate communications.

Fiverr's Israel office recruits most actively for Backend Software Engineers, Full Stack Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Product Managers, and UX/Product Designers. The 2023–2024 AI pivot also generated demand for Applied ML Engineer and AI Product Manager roles that were advertised publicly on LinkedIn and Fiverr's own careers page.

Notable Israeli investors in Fiverr's pre-IPO rounds include Qumra Capital, an Israeli growth equity fund managed by Adam Coman and Shmil Levy, which participated in Fiverr's 2019 pre-IPO growth round. Bessemer Venture Partners led earlier institutional rounds and has a long track record with Israeli portfolio companies. Other pre-IPO backers included Accel Partners and Square Peg Capital. The involvement of Qumra Capital, which focuses exclusively on Israeli and Israeli-founded technology companies, underscores Fiverr's deep roots in the Tel Aviv ecosystem.

Fiverr's Israeli workplace culture reflects the broader Tel Aviv startup environment: open-plan offices, flat organizational hierarchies relative to American corporate norms, and a strong expectation of cross-functional collaboration between product and engineering. In 2022, Fiverr published its annual Freelance Forward Israel index, a proprietary survey reporting a 32% year-over-year increase in the number of active Israeli sellers on the platform between 2020 and 2022, positioning Israel as one of the top seller-origin countries globally on the Fiverr Marketplace.