Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR). Founded 2010 in Tel Aviv by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger. Freelance services marketplace pivoting from transactional gigs to high-value AI-enabled work. FY 2025 revenue $433M. 2026 guidance $380–420M. 2.9M annual active buyers. IPO'd 2019.
Israeli Tech | Olam.business
Fiverr is the Tel Aviv-founded online marketplace for freelance digital services — the platform that pioneered fixed-price gig transactions and is now repositioning as a high-value work platform in the AI era. Founded in 2010 by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger. Listed on the NYSE under the ticker FVRR since June 2019. Full-year 2025 revenue of approximately $433 million with 10% growth and adjusted EBITDA of $92 million.
At a Glance
| Entity | Fiverr International Ltd. |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Founders | Micha Kaufman (CEO) and Shai Wininger |
| Headquarters | Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Exchange | NYSE: FVRR |
| IPO | June 2019 |
| FY 2025 revenue | ~$433M (up 10% YoY) |
| FY 2025 adjusted EBITDA | $92M (21% margin) |
| Q1 2026 revenue | $105.5M (down 1.6% YoY) |
| 2026 revenue guidance | $380–420M (deliberate contraction) |
| Annual active buyers (Q1 2026) | 2.9M (down 17.8% YoY) |
| Annual spend per buyer (Q1 2026) | $356 (up 15.4% YoY) |
| Marketplace take rate | 27.7% |
The Founders
Micha Kaufman is the founder and CEO — the operator who built Fiverr from a fixed-price $5-gig experiment into a publicly traded global freelance platform. Kaufman has led the company since inception and is now steering the most significant strategic pivot in Fiverr's history: the transformation from a transactional gig marketplace into a platform for complex, AI-augmented professional work.
Shai Wininger co-founded Fiverr with Kaufman in 2010. Wininger subsequently co-founded Lemonade, the AI-native insurance company that also went public on the NYSE — making him one of the rare Israeli founders behind two publicly listed US-exchange companies.
What Fiverr Built
Fiverr's original model was radical in its simplicity: freelancers listed services ("gigs") at a fixed price, starting at $5, and buyers purchased them like products rather than negotiating hourly rates. The platform collapsed the friction of hiring a freelancer — no proposals, no bidding, no scope negotiation — into a one-click transaction. Categories spanned logo design, voiceover, translation, programming, video editing, social media management, and hundreds of other digital services.
The model attracted millions of buyers and freelancers globally. Fiverr went public on the NYSE in June 2019 and became one of the pandemic-era beneficiaries as remote work accelerated freelance adoption. Revenue peaked alongside the remote-work boom before normalizing as the pandemic tailwind faded.
The AI Pivot
AI is simultaneously Fiverr's greatest threat and its strategic pivot thesis. The low-value, repetitive tasks that drove Fiverr's volume — simple logo creation, basic translation, template-level programming — are exactly the categories AI automation is absorbing fastest. Marketplace revenue in Q1 2026 declined 13.6% year over year to $67.1 million, and annual active buyers fell 17.8% to 2.9 million.
Kaufman's response is a deliberate transformation: deprioritize low-value transactional volume and reposition Fiverr as a platform for high-value, complex, AI-augmented work where human expertise, accountability, and project management still matter. The evidence of the shift is visible in the numbers: annual spend per buyer climbed 15.4% to $356 even as buyer count dropped. Services revenue — Fiverr's managed-services and enterprise offering — grew 30% year over year to $38.4 million in Q1 2026.
New product launches include Dynamic Matching (AI-driven talent matching for complex projects), managed services for enterprise clients, and an AI Video Hub launched in March 2026 that positions freelance directors alongside AI production tools.
The 2026 Financial Profile
The pivot carries deliberate short-term cost. FY 2026 guidance of $380–420 million implies 3–12% revenue decline — the first intentional contraction in Fiverr's public history. Adjusted EBITDA guidance of $64–80 million targets an 18% margin at midpoint, down from 21% in FY 2025, reflecting investment in the transformation.
Q1 2026 showed the early contours: total revenue of $105.5 million (down 1.6%), but GAAP net income jumped to $8.6 million from $0.8 million, and adjusted EBITDA hit $22.6 million at a 21.4% margin — higher profitability on lower revenue, driven by mix shift toward higher-value work.
Where Fiverr Sits in the Israeli Tech Cohort
Fiverr belongs to the cohort of Israeli-founded consumer-facing marketplace companies that reached NYSE/Nasdaq listing scale in the late 2010s — alongside Lemonade (co-founded by Wininger), Wix, Monday.com, and JFrog. Within that cohort, Fiverr is distinctive for being a pure consumer marketplace rather than a SaaS platform — its economics are transaction-driven, its user base is global and individual-buyer-dominated, and its competitive dynamics are marketplace-network-effects rather than enterprise-contract-retention.
In the freelance marketplace category globally, Fiverr competes with Upwork (the hourly-rate-based freelance platform), Toptal (premium-vetted talent), and an expanding set of AI-native service platforms that are attempting to replace the freelancer entirely.
Why Fiverr Matters
Three reasons. First, the AI-era marketplace test case — Fiverr is the clearest public-market example of a platform navigating the transition from pre-AI to AI-augmented work. How Kaufman manages the shift from volume to value will be studied as a template for every marketplace facing AI-driven category disruption. Second, the Israeli consumer-marketplace model — Fiverr demonstrated that an Israeli-founded company could build a global consumer marketplace at scale, a category historically dominated by US-founded platforms. Third, the Wininger connection — Fiverr and Lemonade share a co-founder, making the Kaufman-Wininger partnership one of the most prolific Israeli founder pairings by combined public-market outcomes.
The risk is execution: Fiverr is deliberately shrinking revenue to reposition the platform, betting that high-value work will compound faster than low-value work decays. That bet hasn't been proven yet.
FAQ
What does Fiverr do?
Fiverr operates a global online marketplace connecting businesses and individuals with freelance professionals offering digital services. The platform is transitioning from low-cost transactional gigs to higher-value, complex, AI-augmented professional work.
Who founded Fiverr?
Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger co-founded Fiverr in 2010 in Tel Aviv. Kaufman remains CEO. Wininger subsequently co-founded Lemonade.
Where is Fiverr headquartered?
Tel Aviv, Israel.
When did Fiverr go public?
June 2019 on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FVRR.
What was Fiverr's 2025 revenue?
Approximately $433 million, up 10% year over year, with adjusted EBITDA of $92 million at a 21% margin.
Why is Fiverr's 2026 revenue guidance lower than 2025?
Fiverr is deliberately deprioritizing low-value transactional work and investing in high-value, AI-augmented services. The 2026 guidance of $380–420 million reflects this intentional contraction during the multi-year transformation.
How is AI affecting Fiverr?
AI is automating the low-value, repetitive tasks that drove Fiverr's transaction volume, causing marketplace revenue and active buyer counts to decline. Simultaneously, AI is creating demand for complex projects where human expertise, accountability, and workflow management are essential — the category Fiverr is repositioning to capture.
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