Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by number of users and projects. Through its marketplace, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software development, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering, the sciences, sales and marketing, accounting and legal services.
The company has 52 regional websites and supports 21 currencies and 34 languages. In 2016, Freelancer.com achieved a milestone of 20 million users and almost 10 million posted projects.
Matt Barrie, one of Australia's leading technology entrepreneurs, founded Freelancer.com in 2009 after recognising the business potential of the online services market. Since then, Freelancer.com has acquired more than a dozen outsourcing marketplaces around the world.
In 2015–16, NASA's Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, through the NASA Tournament Lab, partnered with Freelancer.com to design CAD models of tools to be used by the Robonaut 2 on the International Space Station, a robotic arm, and a series of logos.
The company has collaborated with governments in Colombia, Malaysia and the Philippines on projects designed to help grow freelance markets, educate people and generate sustainable models of self-employment. In Colombia, Freelancer.com is supporting the government’s Plan Vive Digital (Live Digital Plan), which encourages telework and freelance work practices to increase business productivity, improve workers’ quality of life and promote the effective use of information and communication technologies.
The judges commended Freelancer.com for disrupting the traditional way of hiring contractors and accessing overseas markets, describing it as “a fantastic eCommerce export story”.
Qantas Freight is a proud sponsor of the e-Commerce Award category.
