Freelancer buys Canadian freelance marketplace
Australian outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace, Freelancer.com, has acquired Canadian freelance marketplace Scriptlance.
Scriptlance claims to have more than 360,000 enterprise and professional users from 244 countries. The company also says that 600,000 projects have been posted to its site, with US$43 million paid out to freelancers. Scriptlance was started in 2001 by 20-year-old Canadian entrepreneur René Trescases and was incorporated as R3N3 International.
"We are tremendously excited to acquire Scriptlance, which is truly one of the great trailblazers and most widely recognised brands in the online outsourcing industry," said Matt Barrie, chief executive of Freelancer.com.
The acquisition marks the official entrance of Freelancer.com into the Canadian market. After the acquisition, Freelancer.com projects that its user base will number over 4 million, or 2.5 times its nearest competition.
Scriptlance members will be automatically transitioned to the Freelancer.com platform, with the process to start immediately. User information and projects will be moved across to Freelancer.com, including account balances, user profiles, messages, milestone payments, active projects and past projects.
Those who have accounts on both sites will have their accounts merged into one Freelancer.com account.
"We’re thrilled to be joining forces with the global leader in the space. Selling to Freelancer made a lot of sense for us — they have the number one brand, and the best scale and geographic reach of anyone in the industry," Trescases said.
Freelancer.com now operates through the Freelancer brand or sister brands in countries across the world, including Canada, Sweden, the US, the UK, Australia and China.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.