Fiverr co-founder/CEO (NYSE: FVRR). Built the freelance services marketplace from Tel Aviv. Co-founded with Shai Wininger (also Lemonade). 16-year single-company CEO. $350M+ annual revenue.
Micha Kaufman is the co-founder and CEO of Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR) — the Israeli-founded freelance services marketplace that redefined how businesses buy creative and professional services online. Co-founded in 2010 with Shai Wininger — who later also co-founded Lemonade with Daniel Schreiber.
Fiverr IPO'd on the NYSE in June 2019 at a $650 million valuation, peaked above $10 billion market cap in early 2021 during the remote-work acceleration, and subsequently repriced in the growth-stock correction. The company generates over $350 million in annual revenue and serves millions of buyers across 160+ countries from its Tel Aviv headquarters.
The $5 Gig That Became a Global Services Marketplace
Kaufman's original insight was radical simplification: every service starts at $5 ("a fiverr"). The constraint forced sellers to define discrete deliverables and buyers to browse services like products. The marketplace model inverted the traditional freelance hiring process — instead of posting a job and reviewing applicants, buyers browse a catalog of pre-defined services with transparent pricing, reviews, and delivery timelines.
The platform has since evolved far beyond $5 gigs. Fiverr Business, Fiverr Pro, and subscription-based services serve enterprise clients. The AI wave has reshaped the marketplace: AI-assisted design, AI-powered content creation, and prompt engineering have become fast-growing categories. Kaufman has positioned Fiverr as AI-augmented rather than AI-displaced — sellers use AI tools to deliver faster and cheaper, rather than being replaced by them.
Where Kaufman Sits in the Israeli Founder Landscape
Kaufman and Wininger's co-founding of Fiverr, followed by Wininger's departure to co-found Lemonade, produced one of the most unusual founder-branching stories in Israeli tech: a single co-founding pair that spawned two NYSE-listed companies in unrelated categories (freelance services and insurance).
Kaufman has run Fiverr for 16 years as a single-company CEO — rare in the Israeli ecosystem where serial founding is the norm. The company competes with Upwork, Toptal, and increasingly with AI-native alternatives. Kaufman's thesis: the human freelancer augmented by AI tools outperforms both pure-AI solutions and unaugmented human work. The marketplace is the distribution layer for that augmented workforce.
