Upwork

1998–2015: Early history

Elance was founded in 1998 by Bernard Sheth and 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. In 2001, Anumolu, by then eLance's general manager, was indicted on securities fraud charges over kickbacks he was alleged to have taken while working at New York Life before co-founding the company. The company declined to comment.

oDesk was founded in 2003 by Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis, who collaborated remotely between the United States and Greece. Originally created as a staffing firm, oDesk eventually became an online marketplace that allowed registered users to find, hire, and collaborate with remote workers.

Elance and oDesk announced their merger on December 18, 2013, to create Elance-oDesk.

2015–present: Upwork

In 2015, Elance-oDesk was renamed 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. In 2016, the company replaced its flat freelancer fee with a sliding scale, a change that drew protests from users.

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

In January 2020, Hayden Brown was appointed CEO of Upwork. In March 2022, Upwork was named to Time's list of TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2022.

In 2023, the company launched a hub for AI-related services. In 2025, Upwork partnered with OpenAI. In 2024, the company introduced "Uma", an AI assistant. The system was built on large language models trained on platform data.

In September 2024, the activist investor Engine Capital disclosed a four percent stake in Upwork and called for changes to the company's board, saying the company needed to fix "foundational issues". Upwork's shares had fallen 37 percent since the start of the year. The following month, the company reported a quarterly profit of $28 million and cut 21 percent of its workforce.

Businesses and individuals connect through the Upwork 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. Freelancers are also required to purchase "connects" in order to be able to bid for jobs.

Fees

Until 2016, Upwork charged freelancers a flat fee of 10 percent of their earnings. In May 2016 the company replaced it with a sliding scale based on a freelancer's lifetime billings to each client: 20 percent on the first $500, 10 percent on billings up to $10,000, and 5 percent beyond that, with a separate 2.75 percent payment-processing charge for clients. Chief executive Stephane Kasriel said the change was meant to encourage longer-term projects and that the company was losing money on smaller jobs. Freelancers protested on Twitter and Reddit. In a survey of 226 freelancers posted in Upwork's online community, nearly 78 percent said their average contract per client was under $500, meaning their fees would double.

Security and fraud

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.

In a 2024 Mashable feature, the writer Justin Caffier described losing $475 to a fake-client scheme that exploited the pressure on new freelancers to build up the platform's "Job Success Score" rating. In June 2026, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance warned that Chinese state actors were using LinkedIn, Indeed and Upwork to pose as recruiters and target people with access to sensitive government information.