12 Facts About Upwork

Upwork Global Inc, formerly Elance-oDesk, is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California.

Upwork was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk, after the merger of Elance Inc and oDesk Corp.

In 2017, Upwork had over twelve million registered freelancers and five million registered clients.

In March 2022, Upwork was named to TIME's List of 100 Most Influential Companies of the year 2022.

In 2015, the new company was rebranded as Upwork, which coincided with an upgrade of the oDesk platform under the same name.

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The newly named Upwork planned to phase out the Elance platform within a couple of years.

The Upwork platform has experienced brief outages, with one in September 2015 leading to an apology from then-CEO Stephane Kasriel.

On 7 March 2022, Upwork started suspending operations for freelancers and clients in Russia and Belarus, as a sanction following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Upwork allows clients to interview, hire and work with freelancers and freelance agencies through the company's platform.

Upwork platform includes a real-time chat feature that either clients or freelancers can use to message prospects.

In March 2017, Upwork reported 14 million users in 180 countries with $1 billion USD in annual freelancer billings.

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 Fiverr marketplace.