In 2021, gig marketplace Fiverr acquired Stoke Talent, a startup developing freelance management tools for employers, for $95 million. The move expanded Fiverr’s business by bringing it into into new and adjacent areas of the employment market, diversifying the publicly-traded company’s offerings.
Now, after nearly two years following the acquisition, Fiverr’s unveiling a talent management product built on top of Stoke Talent’s offerings called Fiverr Enterprise. Shahar Erez, the GM of Fiverr Enterprise, describes it as a step toward Fiverr being able to accommodate larger businesses that may already have a group of freelancers but plan to further tap into the contractor workforce.
“Fiverr Enterprise is a Freelance Management System, an end-to-end software solution that gives businesses complete control over the hiring, management, payment and compliance processes of their freelance workforce,” Erez said via email. “Fiverr Enterprise provides value to businesses even when they have existing freelancer relationships that are offline or outside of Fiverr, meaning that businesses can now build their own curated freelance workforce with both online and offline talent.”
Fiverr Enterprise aims to streamline many of the processes around managing large teams of freelancers, like legal and payment paperwork and ensuring a consistent onboarding and compliance flow for workers. Drawing on Stoke Talent’s legal, tax and worker classification capabilities, Enterprise attempts to give greater visibility into an organization’s freelance workforce.
Fiverr charges a monthly subscription for Fiverr Enterprise as well as a percentage of monthly payments run through the Fiverr Enterprise platform. Customers get a single bill for all their freelancers each month.
Asked about how Fiverr Enterprise fits into Fiverr’s broader, long-term strategy, Erez said that it’s emblematic of the company’s increasing embrace of the upmarket, which (not coincidentally) began right around when Fiverr went public in 2019. He pointed to the launch of Fiverr Business in 2020 as another example, as well as the rollout of Project Partner earlier this year.
Fiverr Business allows teams of freelancers to collaborate across a range of projects, while Project Partner helps teams manage those projects.
“As the freelance workforce continues to grow, with estimates saying 50% of the U.S. workforce will be freelance by 2030, ambitious businesses understand that they need a workforce strategy that encompasses freelance and contractor talent,” Erez said. “Fiverr Enterprise offers a key solution for larger businesses who need a simple way to onboard freelance talent across the world while having full visibility of that part of their total workforce.”
Fiverr might have the advantage of a large existing customer base — it says that a group of customers from Stoke Talent including Amdocs, Similarweb, MinuteMedia and Waymo have already piloted Fiverr Enterprise. But there’s a fair amount of competition, mostly from startups, in the space for gig worker management.
Rivals to Fiverr Enterprise include Worksome, which raised $13 million in May 2021 to expand its freelance talent platform, and Wingspa , which secured $14 million in March for its all-in-one payment platform for contracts. There’s also Superside, backed by tens of millions in venture capital, which connects and manages freelance creatives working with in-house marketing and design teams.
But Erez didn’t express much concern.
“Fiverr saw a growing demand from enterprise companies looking for a solution to manage their contingent workforce and bought Stoke Talent to meet that demand,” he said. “Fiverr Enterprise is the only software-as-a-service platform powered by one of the world’s leading marketplace, Fiverr.”
Fiverr Enterprise aims to streamline managing large groups of freelancers by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch