Freelance work marketplace Fiverr said to be seeking IPO at $1 billion valuation

Company officials have met with potential Wall Street underwriters for share offering by start of 2019, TheMarker financial daily reports

By Shoshanna Solomon 28 August 2018, 1:22 pm Edit

Shoshanna Solomon is The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter

Israel’s Fiverr is looking to hold an initial public offering of shares in New York at a company valuation of at least $1 billion, TheMarker reported on Tuesday without saying where it got the information.

Representatives of the company have been meeting with potential Wall Street underwriters and is targeting the beginning of next year for a share offering on the Nasdaq, TheMarker reported, citing unnamed sources.

The startup, which has raised some $111 million to date, according to data compiled by Start-Up Nation Central, has become a global leader for online freelance services. The firm was set up in 2010 by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger.

A spokesman for the startup declined to comment.

Fiverr’s co-founder and CEO, Micha Kaufman (Courtesy: Yuval Taog)

On the Fiverr platform, freelancers can offer their services in a wide variety of categories, starting from $5. As of September 2017, Fiverr offered a catalog of digital services in over 150 categories, with more than 10 million services online from 150 countries, according to data provided by the company. And some 6,000 new services were added every day. The company employed some 280 workers, 180 of them in Israel and the rest in the US.

A report by IVC Research Center in Dec. 2017 said that Fiverr was one of 24 Israeli firms that are ripe to hold an initial public offering of shares on the stock market, based on the amount of funds they raised in their latest funding round.

In the first half of the year Israeli firms held just three initial public offerings, compared to eight in the first half of 2017, as startups preferred to raise funds in readily available private capital funding ounds. The amounts raised in the three IPOs were relatively modest, ranging between $11 million and $86 million, according to a report by IVC Research Center and Meitar.

Meanwhile, the timing for a tech IPO is propitious: the Nasdaq composite crossed the 8,000 milestone for the first time Monday, closing at an all-time high, fueled by tech stocks including Apple, Netflix and Amazon.