Upwork Global Inc., formerly Elance-oDesk, is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California. The company was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk, after the merger of Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. The merged company subsequently rebranded to Upwork in 2015. In 2017, Upwork had over twelve million registered freelancers and five million registered clients. More than three million jobs worth over $1 billion USD together were posted in 2017. In March 2022, Upwork was named to TIME's List of 100 Most Influential Companies of the year 2022. History Elance was founded in 1998 by MIT graduate Beerud Sheth and Wall Street veteran Srini Anumolu in a two-bedroom apartment 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. oDesk was founded in 2003 by two friends, Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis, who wanted to work together even though one of them was in the U.S. and the other was in Greece. Originally created as a staffing firm, oDesk was eventually built into 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. In 2015, the new company was rebranded 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. The Upwork platform has experienced brief outages, with one in September 2015 leading to an apology from then-CEO Stephane Kasriel. The company was listed on the Inc. 5000 list from 2009 to 2014 and filed for an initial public offering on October 3, 2018. On March 7, 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. Service and business model Upwork allows clients to interview, hire and work with freelancers and freelance agencies through the company's platform. The client posts 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 else post the job for any freelancer who is interested to apply. Once the client has chosen who they want to complete the