oDesk, the site that helps customers find and remotely monitor outsourced developers, has raised $15 million in a Series C funding round led by DAG Ventures. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, and Sigma Partners also participated in the round. This brings oDesk’s total funding to $29 million.
oDesk allows companies to weed through thousands of (usually) qualified developer profiles, which include aptitude scores based on site-wide standardized tests. Projects can either be completed for hourly rates or a flat fee. After hiring a team, customers can monitor progress through a visual timeline that broadcasts screenshots of the contracted developers.
Since its launch the site has been involved in $32 million worth of service transactions (it now keeps 10% of all fees, though that rate used to be higher). The site says that it will use the money to help fuel growth and “take advantage of any unexpected opportunities down the road”.
Elance and Guru.com have been profitable for a while; why does Odesk need more funding? Anyway if they’re better than rentacoder that’s very good – I tried to post a small personal project on RentACoder and got blocked by some CSR who doesn’t know ~any~thing about projects or coding and so I got annoyed and deleted it completely.
I think this is a great idea, having personally outsourced some projects before it is hard to figure out who can really do a good job and I hope this helps narrow that gap and ensures that those who are best qualified are the ones who people choose (or at least it lets the customer know that the top people are in fact the top people).
Bad business – they’ve gotten greedy and approve just about any provider making it nothing more than another freelance website catering to buyers and buyers only.
Congrats, Gary! Great achievement. oDesk has always had a great vision and is riding the wave of the Flattening World. Look forward to hearing about your continued progress moving the bar up and to the right. Well done.
Hey, really oDesk is a great online business firm offering a big opportunity to find a list of developers and the professionals, seeking development executives. I’m sure this funding process will give a great boom to this company in internet market over the globe.
Scriptlance is better. I’ve used them in the past and is very satisfied.
Believe it or not, people from India are not the best programmers out there and not the cheapest with the highest quality. Americans charge up the oss. I found programmers from Portugal and Hungry there that are high caliber and can do better work than Indian and American counterparts.
With all the hypes about Indians, there are gems in other part of the world not explored by the press. It’s unfortunate.
Thank goodness to the Internet, I don’t have to be limited by public broadcast and big corporations dictating my capital (money). The Internet creates market transparency and the big boys are going to get fcked! Yeah!
From their website
“Pay only for
verified hours worked”
Doesnt anyone else see the problem with this? Surley you want to pay for functionality delivered not hours…
i will give this company about six months until it goes under
best,
carl
Elance, Guru and Odesk have all had a HUGE amount of money put into them, but from my experience further a very faceless, impersonal and over-controlled work environment.
They seem to have learned nothing from advances in social networking and SaaS suppliers. It’s much simpler and more personal now to meet potential clients/providers using Facebook and do work without having 10% of it creamed off. But searching for the right people and trust are still issues tho. A new player in this field, Ki Work, combines search, marketplaces and prof networking for free, addressing trust with its expert-evaluation system. Worth checking out.
I think Elance is much better than oDesk. Elance has been improving the interface for service providers as well as buyers since beginning of 2008. In coming 2 days they will roll out more enhancements. We have been service providers on Elance for last 2 years and it’s been great working with them. We tried oDesk for one month around around Jan 2008. It was slow and has big usability issues. I am not sure how they compare with Guru.com
We are service providers on eLance for quite some time now. Typical project on eLance (in technology domain) is creating social networking sites, social book marking sites, and auction sites and of course some projects are Niche. You get to know about new technologies fastest on eLance because you will soon have someone asking for it. Coming to the point, Most of these projects are large projects and buyer demands a fixed price quote for it. So the basic model of oDesk fails i.e. counting working hours etc fails for these large projects. Non technology projects like writing or translation jobs, ghost writing, eBooks etc work on quality / quantity pricing i.e. service providers have a price that they will quote based on the word size of articles i.e. 450 words article will cost x amount and 1000 words article will cost more etc. So oDesk does not add much value for these projects as well.
Overall, I think oDesk will just become another competitor to eLance and Guru without any big differentiator.
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I use oDesk quite extensively and I would say it is a *must have* for any startup. The simple reality is that it is very difficult to find local talent when Google and Facebook can outspend you by 100X (metaphorically speaking of course!).
Hiring is a difficult and expensive process, particularly when you are on lean budget. oDesk enables you to get up the trust curve very quickly. And it is not about low-cost / low-quality talent. Expensive contractors can point to objective ratings to justify their rates. And if they are productive, there is never any question about their earnings.
I am not going to comment on the competition since I am not familiar enough with them to opine. But to pass off oDesk as simply a rent-a-coder site is a mistake. Core members of my team, people I consider to be key contributors (* and friends*), have been found through oDesk.
ODesk does a good job. I think the on demand outsourcing space is one to watch.
Check out http://www.testcommon.com – new company focused solely on the on- demand testing space. Think Testing-as-a-Service!
Jason – Thanks for covering this news and thanks, everyone, for your comments.
@antje – One nice thing about this round of funding is that we didn’t have a pressing need for more capital, but taking the money does give us more flexibility to accelerate growth towards our vision of changing the way the world works. oDesk is growing faster than we ever have before as more and more companies use our service to build and manage global teams.
Lumping oDesk in with outsourcing project marketplaces really misses a key point. oDesk isn’t a project marketplace. We enable companies to build and manage global teams that work much like a local team. Many oDesk buyers have built entire teams on oDesk and an increasing number of oDesk providers are building global provider firms on oDesk. These are long-term relationships not limited to a single project.
Lastly, if you haven’t tried oDesk recently, give it a shot. We’re constantly raising the bar on user quality and site performance. We’re investing heavily in these areas and we expect both buyers and providers to benefit from improvements. Please keep the feedback coming!
Brian Goler
oDesk
I am lead to believe that O-desk are middlemen between the prospective client and business, and I hope that they mean well in the services that they supply. But, in supplying the said services, they also have a responsibility to make sure that whatever goes on through their website, and also in their name is done in the most professional way possible.
Also I would hope that they would not knowingly allow a company to carry out business poorly, or in such a manner to bring O-desk’s name in to disrepute, by association at least, and if proven that they would take the necessary action to disassociate themselves with the aforementioned removing them from their site if required.
As a customer, I would hope that O-desk would appreciate and take on board positive feedback and recommendations from their customers, so in saying that would like to point out that from the client’s point of view, it would be wise for O-desk to have control and also take interest in processes and transactions done through their website.
In the current climate with regards to their terms & conditions, it could be construed that they do not care – nor want to get involved when things go wrong. I am sure that O-desk do not want to portray this image to either party in any present or future dealings.