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Upwork runs a website and app where businesses hire freelancers for short and long projects.
Upwork is an online marketplace that connects businesses with freelancers. A company needs a logo designed, a website coded, a bookkeeping spreadsheet fixed, or a customer support person for twenty hours a week, and instead of hiring full-time employees, it posts the job on Upwork. Freelancers all over the world apply, and the company picks one. Upwork makes money by taking a cut of what the freelancer gets paid, plus fees for premium services like managing bigger teams or getting matched faster. Its customers are mostly small and midsize businesses, but big companies use it too. Think of it as a giant, always-open job fair where the booths never close and nobody has to move cities.
The business has two main flavors of work. The first is short, project-based gigs, like a one-time design or a quick fix. The second is longer-term relationships, where a company keeps the same freelancer for months or years. That longer-lasting category has been growing faster and is stickier, because once a business builds a trusted team of freelancers on the platform, leaving gets painful. Upwork also pushes into higher-value work like software development and AI-related tasks, which brings in bigger budgets. Annual revenue is roughly $750 million, and growth has slowed from its pandemic boom years to the low single digits as companies spend more carefully.
Upwork was formed in 2015 when two older freelance sites, Elance and oDesk, merged. It went public in 2018. The company generates real cash, and it uses that cash mostly to buy back its own stock, which shrinks the share count and can lift the value of each remaining share. Competition comes from Fiverr on the small-gig side and from traditional staffing agencies on the bigger side. The big question for Upwork is whether it can keep moving upmarket, from quick cheap tasks toward serious, high-trust work, because that is where the money and the moat live.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026