Upwork

Upwork Inc. (formerly Elance-oDesk) is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California.[2] The company was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk after the merger of Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. The merged company was subsequently rebranded as Upwork in 2015.[3]

In March 2022, Upwork was named to Time's list of TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2022.[4]

History

Elance was founded in 1998 by MIT graduate Bernard Sheth and Wall Street veteran Srini Anumolu in Jersey City. In December 1999, the company's 22 employees relocated to Sunnyvale, in California's Silicon Valley. Elance's first product was the Elance Small Business Marketplace.[5]

oDesk was founded in 2003 by two friends, Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis, who walked to work together even though one of them was in the U.S. and the other was in Greece.[6][7] Originally created as a staffing firm, oDesk eventually became an online marketplace that allowed registered users to find, hire, and collaborate with remote workers.[8]

In 2009, a hacker breached Elance and obtained the personal details of more than 1.3 million registered users including names, addresses, passwords, and associated email account data.[9]

Elance and oDesk announced their merger on December 18, 2013, to create Elance-oDesk.[10] In 2015, the new company was rebranded as Upwork, which coincided with an upgrade of the oDesk platform under the same name. The newly named Upwork also planned to phase out the Elance platform within a couple of years.[11]

The company was listed on the Inc. 5000 list from 2009 to 2014 and filed for an initial public offering on October 3, 2018.[12][13]

In January 2020, Hayden Brown was appointed CEO of Upwork.[14]

On March 7, 2022, Upwork started suspending operations for freelancers and clients in Russia and Belarus as a sanction following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.[15]

In 2023, job postings related to AI became the fastest growing category on the Upwork platform and the company created an AI services hub to address the increasing activity.[16] As part of the services hub, Upwork partnered with OpenAI on a program that connected businesses with freelancers who were experienced in AI applications like ChatGPT.[17]

In 2024, the company introduced an AI assistant called Uma. The system was built on large language models and trained with platform data to assist with proposal writing and matching client jobs with freelancers.[18]

Beginning in 2023, Upwork made a series of acquisitions and integrated the acquired technology into its AI tools.[19] The acquisitions included an AI video conferencing platform called Headroom in 2023; a search-as-service company called ObjectiveAI in 2024; and a workforce management company called Bubty in 2025.[19] In 2025, Upwork created a subsidiary to provide services to enterprise clients called Lifted, which integrates Bubty and Ascen, [19] a compliance and EOR company acquired in 2025.[20]

Service and business model

Businesses and individuals can connect through this platform to conduct business. Clients post a description of their job and a price range they are willing to pay for a freelancer to complete it. The client may invite specific freelancers to apply for their jobs, or post the job for any freelancer who is interested to apply. Once the client has chosen who they want to complete the job, they hire that freelancer by sending a contract with set hours, pay rate, and a deadline for the work to be completed.[21] Freelancers are also required to purchase "connects" in order to be able to bid for jobs.[22]

Size, scope, and changes

In March 2017, Upwork reported 14 million users in 180 countries with US$1 billion in annual freelancer billings.[23][24]

In 2020, the company purged 1.8 million freelancers.[25][26] In a 2019 call with investors Upwork CEO, Hayden Brown, said that Upwork would be focusing more on serving the needs of Fortune 500 companies rather than smaller companies just looking for a quick job with a single gig worker. Brown also spoke of a "skill gap" between what companies were looking for and what they were getting. Many of the freelancers purged were rated as "less skilled" or had lower rankings on the platform.[27]

In October 2020, Upwork launched a new feature called "Project Catalog" that allows freelancers and agencies to offer pre-scoped services at fixed prices, similar to the Fiverr marketplace.[28]

External links