History of Upwork

Upwork was formed 18 months after Elance and oDesk announced their merger on December 18, 2013 to create Elance-oDesk.[ oDesk was founded in 2003 by Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis. Elance was founded in 1999 by Beerud Sheth and Srini Anumolu. With the launch of Upwork, the oDesk platform was upgraded and rebranded and the company announced that the Elance platform would be phased out within a couple of years, resulting in a single freelance marketplace. In early September 2015, the service experienced an outage which led to an apology being issued by CEO Stephane Kasriel. This led to the introduction of an Upwork Status page to offer freelancers and clients greater transparencyOn 3 May 2016, the firm announced that the service fee for freelancers will change from flat rate of 10% to a "sliding service fee" of 5% to 20% based on total lifetime billings with each client: 20% for the first $500 billed to the client across all contracts, 10% for total billings with the client between $500.01 and $10,000, and 5% for total billings with the client that exceed $10,000. As of March 2017, it reported 14 million users in 180 countries with $1B in annual freelancer billings. From its foundation in 1999, the company has raised a total of $168 million through 10 private equity funding rounds.