A used sofa is an unlikely ambassador for a $950 million business. Yet Yad2, the Israeli classifieds company whose name means secondhand, has made a home for both small household clear-outs and some of the largest decisions in a person’s life. The furniture gets the joke across. The apartments explain the money.
In December 2025, Apax agreed to buy Yad2 from KKR for a reported $950 million. Apax now lists the company in its portfolio with an investment year of 2026. That price was attached to a change of ownership, not a giant cheque for building a new app. Investors were buying an established place where buyers look and professional sellers advertise.
The telling number is 56%. That was property’s share of revenue in sale materials reported by industry publication Online Marketplaces. Autos supplied 27% and jobs 15%. Together, those categories accounted for 98% of the reported mix. For a business associated with getting rid of things, Yad2 earns its keep around finding a home, transport and work.
The apartment behind the armchair
Yad2 operates four principal markets: real estate, vehicles, secondhand goods and recruitment through Drushim IL. Consumers bring supply and attention. Agents, developers, vehicle dealers and employers bring a recurring commercial need to reach those consumers. Apax’s own description emphasizes direct traffic and consumer listings, alongside the platform’s role as a professional marketing channel.
There is a practical connection between the categories. Moving house can mean selling furniture, buying appliances and reconsidering a commute. A new job can change the apartment search. That does not prove every user travels neatly between Yad2’s sections. It does explain why the combination makes sense on a single familiar website.
The homepage reflects this decidedly unglamorous range. There are new developments and commercial properties, motorcycles and trucks, bicycles and baby equipment. There is even a category for things being given away. The customer problem is straightforward: finding someone with the thing you need, close enough and at a price worth discussing.
Share of revenue, not listings. Sale-material figures reported in December 2025; remainder calculated. Projections are not audited results.
Twenty years, several owners
Founded in 2005 by Shone Tell, whose name also appears in English reports as Shaun Tel, Yad2 attracted a succession of buyers. Walla acquired a 75% stake in 2010 at a reported company valuation of NIS 150 million, then purchased the rest in 2013. The following year brought an international buyer.
Axel Springer Digital Classifieds announced the acquisition in May 2014 for approximately €165 million. Its announcement described roughly 10,000 new property, vehicle and other classified advertisements arriving daily. Even then, this was an operating business with substantial activity, rather than a speculative promise about what classifieds might become.
Yad2 subsequently added recruitment through a stake in Drushim and expanded premium advertising and data services. Tomy Schoenfeld became CEO in 2022. By late 2025, the business was attracting another auction. Globes reported that Apax beat Blackstone and CVC, having previously lost the 2014 contest to Axel Springer.
The latest sale materials reportedly projected about €83 million in 2025 revenue and €37 million in adjusted EBITDA. Those are forecasts and a measure of operating earnings, respectively. They help explain investor interest, but the $950 million sale price should not be treated as revenue, investment in the product or money raised from venture capitalists.
Sell the audience a useful shortcut
The commercial model gives professional sellers reasons to pay for visibility. CTech has described premium advertisement placements, data sales and marketing services among Yad2’s expansions. A dealer with continuing inventory has different needs from someone selling one bicycle. An agent marketing several apartments is buying repeated access to prospective clients.
The inference is simple: enough useful listings attract searchers, and enough searchers make advertising worthwhile. But the arrangement creates a balancing act. A buyer wants the most relevant result. An advertiser wants attention. Paid prominence becomes less valuable if the experience stops producing worthwhile enquiries.
Yad2 also sits near services needed around a purchase. Its property navigation includes mortgage advice, while vehicle pages link to finance, inspections and insurance comparison. These are visible routes to adjacent services; their presence does not mean Yad2 itself supplies every service or earns an identical fee from each one.
That distinction matters to users. The platform can help locate a vehicle or an apartment and put relevant services nearby. It cannot make an unsuitable car suitable or turn an unaffordable apartment into a bargain. Search convenience is valuable, but it is only one part of completing the transaction.
A better question than “How much?”
Yadata extends the property search into research. The free service presents estimated property values, local supply and demand indicators, price trends and recent transactions. It also describes the gap between asking and achieved prices. That is useful territory for anyone trying to interpret an optimistic listing.
Its distinction between a market favouring buyers and one favouring sellers puts individual advertisements into context. The amount on one screen tells you what one seller wants. Information about a neighborhood can help frame what else is available and how much interest that area attracts.
Yadata publishes scale figures including 716,000 property advertisements and 360 million property-ad views, labelled annual averages. These are different measures: a view is not a purchase, and repeated attention is not a new buyer. Their relevance is the volume of market activity available for analysis.
A useful way to approach the product is to start with an area, inspect its indicators and compare the estimate with actual listings. Treat the estimate as a reference point. The specific condition and characteristics of a home still matter. A calculator can organize questions; it cannot visit the flat for you.
Sometimes the browser needs a street
One of Yad2’s more revealing marketing experiments involved getting people away from their screens. In 2018, marketing head Ayelet Nitsan explained that the site was used heavily for property and cars, while everyday secondhand goods had catching up to do. Familiarity with the brand had not translated equally across categories.
The response was Yad2 Live: street festivals with stalls, entertainment and opportunities to meet. The September 2018 Jerusalem edition drew a reported 25,000 visitors and more than 100 stalls. Nitsan said preparing the Tel Aviv event took her team six months. The commitment was substantial even before counting the cash budget.
“We want to get people to see second-hand as a way of life.”Ayelet Nitsan / Head of Marketing, 2018
The lesson for marketers is to identify the behavior missing beneath a healthy traffic total. In Yad2’s case, the festival addressed participation in a particular category. Copying the tents would miss the point. A business would need enough local buyers and sellers, and a reason for them to enjoy meeting, to make that approach plausible.
The search has to earn the next visit
Yad2’s mobile app offers a quieter version of the same effort to bring people back. Users can search by location or map, save advertisements and retain searches. Alerts can flag relevant additions. The Google Play listing shows more than one million downloads, a cumulative distribution measure rather than a daily audience count.
For a renter, those features reduce the need to rebuild the same query each morning. For someone comparing cars, saving candidates makes a shortlist easier to revisit. They are modest conveniences, but classifieds are full of repetitive work. Removing some of it is a credible reason to open the app again.
There are alternatives. Facebook Marketplace competes for casual resale, while Madlan offers property listings and neighborhood information. Yad2’s breadth is an advantage for people whose needs cross categories. A specialist can still be the better starting point for a particular search, and sellers can advertise in more than one place.
The resulting competitive test is local and specific. Does this search contain useful, available inventory? Does the information help someone choose? Do sellers receive worthwhile responses? The logic becomes weaker when local supply is thin, listings lose relevance or another service connects the same people with less effort.
The people behind the listings
Yad2 says it employs more than 300 people. Its careers material describes internal moves from development into team leadership and from customer service into product work. Its stated priorities are courage, professionalism and collaboration. These are the employer’s claims, but the examples are more informative than another photograph of an office coffee machine.
A more consequential view of the organization appeared after the October 2023 attacks. In an interview published by Axel Springer, Yad2’s HR chief described remote work, daily CEO messages and emotional support for staff. The company also used its reach to help people offer accommodation to those affected.
More than 1,000 accommodation offers appeared within 48 hours, according to that account. The episode showed a concrete use for a marketplace’s existing audience: connecting people with spare space to people who urgently needed it. The listings mechanism was familiar; the immediate need had changed.
What the next owner has to preserve
Apax inherits a company with a recognizable consumer habit and several commercial markets attached to it. Its challenge can be expressed without private-equity vocabulary: keep making the search useful enough that people return, and keep making the resulting attention useful enough that professionals pay.
There is a copyable sequence here for other marketplace operators. Establish supply people want, make comparison easier, then build services around the decisions users are already making. Yad2’s property data and saved searches illustrate that sequence. Neither requires pretending that every customer wants a completely new way to shop.
The $950 million price tag belongs to the ownership story. The everyday test is much smaller: an apartment worth viewing, a car worth inspecting, a job worth applying for. Yad2’s next chapter depends on how often those ordinary searches end well.