Afternoon Coffee: Fiverr releases positive 2020 financial results; Beeline and Brightfield launch SmartBuyer; PRO recap: B2B payments, direct materials, complex services, Negotiatus Vendor Analysis, and BuyerQuest acquisition & e-pro as a weapon

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Fiverr, the online freelancer platform provider, has announced its Q4 2020 and full year (FY) 2020 financial results. The company experienced high growth, partly driven by coronavirus tailwinds, as normalization of remote work increased and demand among small and mid-sized businesses for digital marketing services grew. Fiverr’s innovations (e.g., Promoted Gigs or services, subscriptions for certain services, etc.), global expansion and sophisticated marketing (Fiverr has no sales force) also likely contributed to the company’s growth.

Q1 2020

• Revenue for Q4 2020 grew 89% year-over-year (YoY) to $55.9 million
• Active buyers, as of Dec. 31, 2020, grew 45% YoY to 3.4 million
• Spend per buyer, as of Dec. 31, 2020, grew YoY by 20% to $205
• Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 2020 increased to $4.6 million, compared to $3.3 million in Q4 2019. Note: EBITDA turned positive for the first time

FY 2020

• Revenue for FY 2020 grew 77% YoY to $189 million
• Adjusted EBITDA for FY 2020 — increase of 45% YoY to $9.1 million compared to $3.3 million in FY 2019

Future Guidance

	Q1 2021	FY 2021
Revenue	$63.0 - $65.0 million	$277.0 - $284.0 million
YoY growth	84-90%	46-50%
Adjusted EBITDA	$4.0 - $3.0 million	$16.0 - $21.0 million

Fiverr’s target market continues to be SMBs, but it has been gradually moving up market through the mid-sized market, as we have been covering. For example, see past Spend Matters coverage like “New solution Fiverr Business continues Fiverr’s up-market move, helps teams collaborate remotely with freelancers.”

Beeline and Brightfield launch SmartBuyer, an AI-driven guided buying solution

Beeline, the global software solutions company for sourcing and managing the extended workforce, announced the launch of SmartBuyer, which it co-developed with Brightfield, the extended workforce analytics platform company and long-time Beeline partner. According to the announcement, "SmartBuyer represents the culmination of a year-long research and development project into how sourcing and contracting behaviors of hiring managers at global enterprises impact business outcomes.”

Leveraging Brightfield's TDX platform, “the companies analyzed more than 1 million transactions between thousands of labor contract buyers and suppliers to isolate 2,000 unique buying behaviors that influence business outcomes,” the announcement explained.

New capabilities now embedded in the Beeline requisitioning engine and user experience include:

• AI-generated behavioral profiles of extended workforce buyers/hirers are used to provide a personalized VMS user experience based on past hiring manager buying preferences and selections of contract workers and suppliers.
• Individually tailored, in-application guidance on job design, price point, geographic location and requisition fill risk, all contextualized based on historical user behavior.

Beeline's CEO, Doug Leeby, was quoted in the announcement, saying: "Companies need models that predict and prescribe how to make decisions in the future with the benefit of past successes and failures. The partnership with Brightfield was the obvious choice to help us unlock the collective wisdom of the Beeline customer base. SmartBuyer, coupled with the other behavioral AI VMS product enhancements to follow, will change the VMS from a system of record to a system of intelligence." Beeline, incidentally, recently announced outstanding operation performance in 2020.

Anonymized data that accumulates with ongoing activity in Beeline will also flow back into TDX, benefiting the clients of Brightfield, which has also been on a tear of product innovation.

Andrew Karpie, Spend Matters’ lead analyst of contingent workforce and service procurement technology, said: “For some time, AI-based guided buying has been thought of almost as a holy grail for contingent workforce sourcing. The stage of development of AI has probably not been the gating factor, but having the data has! Large amounts of data must be accumulated and groomed to train machine learning algorithms. So the partnership between Beeline and Brightfield seems very promising.”

Spend Matters' analysts look at B2B payments, direct materials sourcing, complex services, Negotiatus and BuyerQuest’s acquisition

This week, Spend Matters PRO analysts Jason Busch, David Gustin and Nick Heinzmann gave an in-depth look into the B2B payments space, giving a market segmentation of some providers. In other coverage, analyst Pierre Mitchell shared information about the world of direct materials sourcing. Analyst Andrew Karpie dove into the market of complex services. Analyst Xavier Olivera gave a solution overview of Negotiatus, a procure-to-pay (P2P) vendor. Finally, Mitchell analyzed the recent acquisition of BuyerQuest by the ODP Corporation.

Our PRO subscribers can read the full articles, but all readers can see the lengthy intros that frame the issues being discussed. This week:

• E-procurement as a strategic weapon — With BuyerQuest acquisition, ODP preps for war in omnichannel B2B
• Making sense of the world of B2B payments and procurement technology: Backdrop, market segmentation and vendor mapping
• Defining and digitizing direct procurement (Part 1) — Direct materials sourcing
• Complex services are complicated — What’s procurement to do? (Part 2) Vendors and first steps
• Negotiatus: Vendor Analysis — P2P/payment solution overview, roadmap, Negotiatus’ competitors, tech selection tips, strength/weakness

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