Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman / PR
Outbrain Inc., an Israeli firm that offers content recommendations to businesses, and Fiverr, the Nasdaq-listed and Israeli-founded online freelancers marketplace, have both announced layoffs in another blow to Israel Startup Nation. Their moves mean that so far in the month of July a dozen Israeli firms have now either fired employees or been forced to change planned IPOS.
Founded in 2010 by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger, Fiverr offers a global platform connecting businesses with freelance talent in what the company boasts is the simplest way possible.
Fiverr is laying off 60 employees, half of them in Israel. The company is publicly traded on the NYSE. Its shares are down almost 90% of their all time high and have lost 66% of their value since the start of 2022. This is clearly an example of the plummeting worldwide markets due to the international financial crisis.
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The company explained the move in a statement saying, “Over recent months we decided to focus on our core activities and improve our expense structure in order to strengthen and secure our growth in revenue and the improvement in profitability while adjusting to the macro-economic changes.”
Fellow Israeli firm Outbrain has seen its stocks plummet 75% since the company first went public a year ago. So, Outbrain is also making cutbacks. The company is laying off 38 employees, around 3% of its total workforce.
Outbrain boasts that provides more than a billion unique users worldwide with individually tailored content recommendations. The company says that it provides 344 billion content recommendations per month on the Internet. Outbrain reported revenue of $228 million in Q1 2021.
Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav founded Outbrain in 2006 to solve the problem publishers had in replicating the print experience of turning a page to discover the next article or product on the web. Outbrain calls itself the leading recommendation platform for the open web. Its technology enables one-third of the world’s online consumers to discover new things through recommendation feeds on their favorite media and connects advertisers to these audiences to grow their business. Today, Outbrain develops recommendation technology that makes the act of exploring and discovering new things on the open web possible.
