Fiverr acquires Israeli freelance management platform Stoke for $95 million

Fiverr announced on Tuesday the acquisition of Israeli startup Stoke Talent, which has developed a solution to help companies manage their work with freelance talent, for $95 million. With Stoke's product suite, Fiverr is looking to add more value to larger businesses and integrate with existing corporate workflows.

Stoke completed a $15.5 million Series A funding round five months ago led by Battery Ventures, with participation from all previous investors and angels including TLV Partners, Dynamic, and Loop. To date, the company has raised $20 million.

Stoke has developed an all-in-one platform that enables companies to hire top talents quickly, set up automated onboarding workflows aligned with government guidelines, pay multiple invoices across 190 countries, all while ensuring management, finance, and human resources teams have full visibility and control over budgets, in addition to automatic legal and tax compliance. Stoke works with companies of all sizes, including unicorns like TripActions, SimilarWeb, Scale.ai, and Verbit.

“The Stoke acquisition made complete sense on multiple levels,” said Micha Kaufman, Founder and CEO of Fiverr. “It supports Fiverr’s move upmarket and allows us to engage with much larger customers; It allows Fiverr to offer software solutions to businesses that already have freelancers that they work with and now can manage them easily; It allows Fiverr to pair its marketplace talent with large customers that need access to freelancers they still do not yet have a relationship with; It gives Fiverr access to the offline freelancing market that is still orders of magnitude larger than online freelancing; and finally, Stoke is a fast-growing best-in-class product with an incredible team behind it that we are delighted to add to our family.”

Stoke Talent was founded in 2019 by Shahar Erez and Hilik Paz with the goal of making it easier for businesses to leverage freelance talent. Stoke gives companies the ability to build their own talent directory for both online and offline talent, track budget and milestone completions and provides solutions for tax, legal and workforce classification compliance. The company has almost 30 full-time employees and is headquartered in Tel Aviv. Stoke Talent’s current offerings will remain independently operated.

“We share Fiverr’s vision that freelance talent can help propel companies to new heights, both from a productivity and agility standpoint,” said Shahar Erez, Co-founder and CEO at Stoke. “This is an amazing opportunity to continue doing what we love to do, but on a much larger and broader scale. Together with Fiverr, we have the ability to build an ecosystem where businesses can implement a multi-channel freelancer strategy, and provide tools for them to efficiently manage not only freelancer engagement on Fiverr's marketplace, but those off Fiverr's marketplace as well. There are meaningful synergies between the two companies and we’re excited for what the future holds."