Freelancer.com
👤 Matt Barrie (Co-founded Sensory Networks, later sold to Intel. Started Freelancer by buying rivals' users instead of waiting. Holds 44.9%.)🌐 site𝕏
An engineer bought a Swedish job site, then rival after rival, then the escrow company sitting under them.
Will it work? · our read
Bought, not built. Liquidity is the only asset a marketplace owns, and Barrie bought it rival by rival rather than wait. FY25 showed the limit: freelancing grew 0.7%, payments 18.8%.
01How the money moves
Client posts a job free; freelancers bid
→
Client awards it and funds a milestone
→
10% off the worker, 3% off the client
02The numbers
A$55.3MFiledFY25 revenue, audited
FY2025, ended 31 Dec 2025source:
Total revenue A$55,261k, FY25 income statement
GMV is what changed hands between users in FY25. Freelancer kept A$55.3M of it, and GMV itself fell 7.1%. FY25 financial report
Up 4.1% on FY24. GMV was A$881.5M, but that is users' money passing through, not the company's.
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 8 October 2026
FY25 audited financial report — total revenue A$55,261k, GMV A$881.5M, 87.5M registered users, NPAT A$2.2M.Fees and charges — 10% or $5 freelancer fee, 3% or $3 client fee, memberships and per-project upgrades.About, Provenance section — the acquired marketplaces: GetAFreelancer, EUFreelance, Scriptlance, vWorker, Rent-A-Coder, LimeExchange and others.2015 Escrow.com completion deck — acquisition effective 1 Nov 2015; FY14 gross payment volume US$320M, net revenue US$5M.FLN financials (ASX relay) — five-year revenue history.
FILED: A$55.3M is the total revenue line in Freelancer Limited's audited FY25 financial report (income statement A$55,261k; directors' report repeats A$55.3M, up 4.1%), signed 25 February 2026. Three traps we hit while checking. First, GMV A$881.5M is unaudited by the company's own note and is users' money, not revenue; it FELL 7.1% while revenue rose. Second, third-party relays show FY25 revenue as A$53.2M: that is the revenue-from-contracts-with-customers line (A$53,214k), and the A$2,047k gap to the headline total is other revenue, including A$1,760k of interest income. Both numbers are audited; we headline the total the company itself headlines, and readers who want operating revenue only should use A$53.2M. Third, currency: every figure is Australian dollars except the 2015 Escrow.com deck (US$320M volume, US$5M net revenue) and rival revenues, which are US dollars. Marketplace revenue running about 31% of marketplace GMV (A$40.9M of A$133.4M) is our arithmetic from those filed numbers, not a company statement. The company's provenance page says it acquired 'several outsourcing marketplaces including' nine named properties, and gives no dates or prices, so we state no count, no date and no price for those deals. Founder shareholding 44.91% is from the FY25 directors' report. LinkedIn blocks automated access, so only the confirmed X profile is linked. We never score you.