UPWORK, INC

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.

Beginning in 2023, Upwork acquired the AI video conferencing platform Headroom; the search-as-service company ObjectiveAI in 2024; and in 2025 the workforce management company Bubty and Ascen, a compliance and EOR company.

For the 2025 fiscal year the company reported net income of $115.4 million, down 46 percent from $215.6 million the year before. On May 7, 2026, Upwork announced its second layoff of 25% of its workforce within two years. Its shares fell roughly 19 percent over the following five trading sessions, extending a decline of more than 50 percent over the previous 52 weeks. In the second quarter of 2026, Upwork reported year-over-year declines in gross services volume, revenue and active clients.