Careers at SimilarWeb

Mission

SimilarWeb’s mission is to enhance decision making in the online world by measuring every website and mobile app.

History

He started with a jewellery business but ended up measuring the internet. Founder Or Offer had just come out of compulsory military service in the Israeli Defence Forces and was looking for a career. Naturally, his parents’ occupation was the first place he looked. His dad was an artist and his mom, a jewellery designer. Offer thought he could help his mother’s jewellery business grow. The business soon became successful, with Offer hiring 20 employees and making deals with manufacturers in India and China. Offer even brought on a friend to start a chain of jewellery stores.

The idea for SimilarWeb was sparked by a chance conversation that Orr had with a partner. The partner mentioned an American jewellery designer who Orr had not heard of. This led Orr to wonder whether there were other such designers (and competitors) out there. A quick search on the web revealed that no tool existed to find and provide such comparisons. Offer recognized the problem and quickly went to work.

In 2007, Offer reached out to some high school friends and fellow coders in Tel Aviv and persuaded them to join him in solving the problem. After a year and a half of running operations in a bootstrapped fashion, the group decided to officially launch their website in 2009. Until now, everything had been funded by Offer’s jewellery business. Their first product was a browser plugin, which quickly gained popularity.

The group only discovered their business model when they started receiving calls from internet researchers willing to pay to access the data that their plugin was collecting. These researchers encouraged Offer to build more apps and plugins that could collect valuable data on user behaviour. With $100,000 in seed funding and a product idea on hand, the group of friends went to work.

By May 2010, SimilarWeb had received its first round of investment, garnering $1.1 million. By 2011, the company set measuring the internet and overtaking Alexa as its main goals. Remaining small and profitable allowed SimilarWeb to continuing developing its product over the years. It moved its offices to London, UK and acquired smaller start-ups such as AfterDownload and Quettra.

In 2014, Offer received a call from the CEO of Naspers, asking how much money he needed and at what valuation. This conversation led to massive surge in investment, with Naspers leading SimilarWeb’s C, D, and E series funding rounds. To date, the company has attracted over $65 million from investors. The company currently has 300 employees.