Michael Akkerman will become chief executive officer of Similarweb on November 2, 2026, succeeding founder Or Offer after nearly two decades at the helm. Similarweb’s announcement said Akkerman will join from Digital Turbine, where he is chief business officer.
The appointment closes a succession process that Similarweb’s board had begun earlier this year. Offer disclosed in May that he planned to step down, with a transition originally expected to run into mid-2027. The new timetable brings the handover forward while leaving Offer involved during the transition to support customers, partners and employees.
From founder-led build to commercial scale
CTech’s independent report places the change in the context of Similarweb’s effort to turn its data on online and in-app behaviour into a larger business in the age of artificial intelligence. The company said the leadership change will not alter its strategy, operations or financial outlook.
Akkerman brings a commercially oriented background. At Digital Turbine he oversees sales, partnerships, marketing, product and business operations. Earlier roles include chief revenue officer at data.ai, chief product and strategy officer at Cardlytics, and senior commercial positions at Uber, Pinterest and Kenshoo. That mix suggests continuity in the product’s market ambition while changing the person responsible for scaling it.
Offer founded Similarweb in 2007 and has spent almost 20 years building the company. Akkerman said Similarweb sits on a valuable data asset and that he wants to build on it. The next test is practical: whether a founder’s accumulated market knowledge can be carried into a more commercially expansive operating model.
The move follows the kind of founder-to-operator transition that readers saw when Angi named Michael Steib CEO, another leadership reset framed around the next business chapter.\n\nThat distinction matters for a company whose product is itself a lens on changing markets. The board is not announcing a new strategy, and Offer is not disappearing overnight. Instead, Similarweb is pairing a familiar data platform with a leader whose background is built around distribution, partnerships and revenue. The handover will show whether the company can preserve founder-level context while making the commercial machine easier to scale. The board is choosing an operator for the next phase.
