Freelancer acquires Donanza assets

Donanza, an online freelance job marketplace and aggregator that closed down in July last year, has sold its assets to Australia's Freelancer.com.

Freelancer Limited, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), told investors on Wednesday that it had acquired the assets of Donanza for an undisclosed sum.

Until July last year, Donanza's platform aggregated and consolidated freelance jobs published across the web, and matched them with a network of over 350,000 freelancers in its database.

Freelancer said that the acquisition would be funded from its existing cash reserves -- which stood at AU$20.2 million as of the end of December 2014 -- and is not expected to have a material impact on its revenue for the financial year ending 2015.

In a message on its website, Donanza told its former users that Freelancer is in the process of migrating all of its accounts to the Freelancer.com network, with the migration due for completion by the morning of March 18.

In an earlier post announcing its closure in July last year, Donanza said it was on the hunt for a third party to purchase its assets, including the database of its users, and related information that was collected throughout its years of operation.

The company had been in operation since 2008, when it was founded by Ami Dudu, Liran Kotzer, and Gil Pal, accumulating hundreds of thousands of users by the time it shut down.

In mid-2011, it raised $1 million in funding from Google chairman Eric Schmidt's Innovations Endeavors venture capital fund, along with other investors including angel investment group Afterdox.

The acquisition of Donanza's assets represents another notch in Freelancer.com's global expansion strategy.

While the Sydney-based company generates much of its user growth organically, it also acquired a number of online marketplace businesses in 2014.

Mid last year, Freelancer CEO and chairman Matt Barrie estimated that Freelancer had picked up around 1 million new users as a result of the acquisitions, which included internet marketing marketplace and community Warrior Forum, online virtual content marketplace Fantero.com, and Poland's largest online freelancing marketplace site, Zlecenia.przez.net.

It also acquired local technology startup conference and community SydStart for an undisclosed amount in November.