Upwork Inc. (UPWK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

In the interest of time, I think we're going to kick on with our next fireside chat. It's my pleasure to welcome the team from Upwork to the conference and have a fireside chat with Erica Gessert, CFO. Erica, thanks so much for being part of the conference.

Thanks for having us, Eric. Delight to be here.

Okay. So let me do a little bit of background and then we'll get into the conversation. So the first time the safe harbor before we start, Upwork, I would like to remind you that during the fireside chat today. They will make forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. For a discussion of the material risks that could affect the company's actual results, please refer to the Risk Factors section of Upwork's most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. The company will also discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Statements made today are effective only today and will not be updated to reflect subsequent events or circumstances that may arise. And Erica is the Chief Financial Officer of Upwork, where she oversees Upwork's Global finance team and operations. She has more than 20 years of finance operations, analytics and investor relations experience, supporting technology companies. Prior to joining Upwork, Erica served in a number of senior executive roles for PayPal, most recently Chief Transformation Officer reporting to the CEO, and she held Finance and Investor Relations roles at Sprint and Virgin Mobile USA. There we go. Okay. Just a follow-up questions on that. We could talk about our career trajectory. That's amazing. Okay. Erica, I would like to start with just giving you the floor a little bit to level set. But for those who are a little bit less familiar with the company or just even coming out of Q2 earnings, how are you framing for investors where the company sits today, and sort of the journey you've been on.

Yes. Well, thanks. Well, for those who don't know Upwork, we are the world's largest AI and human-powered work platform. So companies of all sizes up to Fortune 100 all the way to solo entrepreneurs come to our platform in order to find talent to get work done. We are the largest at-scale company of our kind. And we're unique in that we are a true tech-enabled platform to enable work. We had what I would call a truly breakout quarter in Q2. We've consistently outperformed the rest of the companies in our industry, which is the human capital industry, so staffing companies over the past several years. We've consistently had our kind of growth rates be 10% to 15% higher than the other staffing agencies in our industry. And in Q2 we really outperformed every single metric financial metric top and bottom line. So it's been a really exciting time for us.

We're building off of that, the company has been dealing with significant macro volatility for quite a long period of time. You have this Q2, you put up these excellent results. Talk a little bit about the momentum building in the business that's within your control as you look out to the second half of the year and 2026. Because there's a lot of things you guys are building as a company that are within your control and then also operating in what continues to be a volatile macro environment.

Yes, look, I think the macro environment isn't doing anyone any favors. And the uncertainty, if anything, is getting stronger, not weaker. And what we've been doing really over the past couple of years is putting ourselves in a position to be macro agnostic. The human capital industry does tend to have impacts from the macro if you look at the BLS data and kind of all the chaos there. The labor market is volatile to say the least. But we've been able to really divide ourselves from that. And over the past few years, our kind of GSV, which is our volume-related metric has been relatively flat compared to, like I said, negative double digits in the rest of the staffing industry. So we've been taking share. But we have now -- what we're saying is bent the GSV curve. And we are now poised to resume GSV and revenue growth. We actually said at the end of last year that we would enter 2025 and have a relatively flat kind of volume-related year as we kind of retooled and prepared ourselves for growth in 2026. We are now well ahead of that plan. And we are poised to start showing GSV growth now, GSV both revenue and GSV growth now and into 2026.

Okay. With that in mind, one of the things I know we've spoken about on public earnings calls, but striking a balance between top line growth and continue to make progress on the margin. So when you layer out your strategic priorities and we think about the macro environment, and what you just said, what do you remind investors about the priorities between revenue growth and margin trajectory.

Well, thanks for bringing up our margin growth. Over the past couple of years, we've gone from -- when I came into the business, we were relatively flat margins, so really 0% margins. Last quarter, we posted 29.3% adjusted EBITDA margin. So a really fantastic margin trajectory. At the same time, what we did was what we did is -- of course, we've made adjustments to sales and marketing and other things, but we've also narrowed our R&D portfolio and really focused on 3 strategic priorities that has enabled us to both grow margins and prepare ourselves to resume GSV and revenue growth. So we're doing it all. And the 3 strategic priorities that we have focused on are really focused on expanding our access to relative pockets of TAM. So first and foremost, of course, is the growth of the AI category itself, which is a great tailwind for us. And we think about that in 2 ways. Number 1 is the growth of the AI category itself, which actually recent inflection point for us in Q2 in that the growth rate of that category increased. So in Q1, the AI category, our fastest-growing category in the platform grew 25% and in Q2, it grew 30%. And we actually see that growth rate continuing to accelerate. So that's a real tailwind for us. The other enabling factor of kind of the AI effication of the overall work industry, is the implementation of AI on our platform. So we have what we call Ooma, which is Upwork's mindful AI companion on our platform. And if you think about the hiring process in general, it is what has been historically friction-filled, right? It's -- people come on to the platform, a client comes on, a business comes on. They write a job description. They post that job. Talent comes on, they have to write job proposals, they post those, the client has to review them, read them all and then interview talent. All of that is now taken care of by AI. So Ooma writes the job post, Ooma writes the job proposals. Ooma can now interview the talent and recommend talent to the client. And coming soon, we will also have Ooma start to create milestones for projects and project managed projects. So all of those things are being completely enabled by AI and reducing friction. What we saw in Q2 is that about $80 million of GSV is now driven by these improvements on the platform, and that is just set to increase.

Okay. So you talked -- and it's been an interesting journey you've been on and you and I have talked about this before, but the initial reaction to AI was quite as a potential negative impact on the company. And I think people have slowly come around to seeing some of the TAM expansion opportunities tied to AI. Has the definition of what you guys are looking at from a broader market opportunity and how you define the future of work changed as a result of what you've learned, especially in the last couple of quarters?

Yes, absolutely. Look, I mean people, I think, especially when I came on a couple of years ago, it's sort of the old Oscar World quote, the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I think that people thought of AI as a real threat to work overall. And what we've seen is a very different story. We've seen, #1, the growth of the AI category itself, as I said, has been a real tailwind. We also see AI truly augmenting other categories on the platform that aren't classically thought of as AI categories. The implementation of coding enablement product kind of AI products are actually helping our talent get work done faster and just increasing their portfolio of work. We're seeing other categories like video and animation, contract law, other things like that, that people thought would actually be disrupted by AI actually start to be accelerated by AI. And so this is a real benefit for us. I think another phenomenon that people need to start to kind of understand better is the fact that as AI starts to enable work, it's not full jobs that are going away, right? It is partial jobs. And human in the loop and the need for people to enable the kind of these AI solutions is going to continue. And what that means is that for companies like us that are offering contingent labor solutions, that can actually be a tailwind for us.

Yes. Okay. Understood. We did touch a little bit earlier on the macro environment overall. And it's been interesting the way you guys have talked about a whole host of demand signals you've seen over the last 6 to 12 months elements of what drives client growth, what drives client spend. Can you just level set on what you're seeing in the macro environment and bringing it back to how it informs client growth, client spend and then differences across types of clients even, which you've talked about before?

Yes, sure. So look, I mean, we have consistently seen the macro environment, as we know, is uneven and will be for some time. And I think, like I said, we have created a set of priorities, and I've only touched on a few of them so far, but a set of priorities that is really enabling us to perform regardless of the macro environment. So we will and are going to resume growth very presently despite the unevenness of macro. What we see from our clients is at the very top of the funnel, we continue to see pressure from kind of new client demand growth. And what we -- at the same time, what we're seeing is that our projects are getting bigger and bigger on the platform. So our customers are coming and trying to -- looking for contingent labor solutions to enable both AI solutions as well as all of the 130 categories of work on our platform. And the places where we may see sudden substitution of AI is at the very smallest, most transactional types of work. Now that's about 5% of the GSV in our platform. The rest of the GSV in our platform bigger jobs, kind of larger, more complex jobs are simply being AI-enabled and we're seeing kind of wallet growth there.

Okay. Understood. So I do want to get into some of those strategic priorities because this is a technology conference. We'll turn to AI next, sort of contractually obligated, I think to bring that up. You've been at the forefront of trying to push AI into elements of all parts of your platform. Talk about where the AI integration into the freelancer and the business sides of your platform set today and how you think that might scale in the future and what it might mean for growth?

Well, like I said, in Q2, what we saw was the very early kind of implementations of kind of AI enabling platform are driving about $80 million of GSV. And that's just the very beginning. What we see is both on the freelancer side, so freelancers adopting AI tools. And we actually have a subscription product today called Freelancer Plus that offers kind of an upward ChatGPT like product to access to our freelancers. There's an opportunity for us to offer preferred access of AI tools to help freelancers enable their work even -- to an even greater degree in new subscription products, and that's just going to be a growth mechanism for us. Another very important area of growth for us is a product that we call Business Plus on the marketplace. And that product is it's a premium take rate product. It's in the very early innings of adoption. We actually saw GSV growth of 190% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 and that is at the very early phases. Customers who adopt Business Plus, which is going to have kind of -- it's a [ premium ticketing ] product. So it's double the take rate on the client side of what we normally -- of our normal pricing. And some of our new AI enablement products, Ooma project management, other kind of tools like that, that will help work get done on platform are going to be part of this Business Plus product. And beyond that, the really interesting future for us is the opportunity for AI-agentic work to happen on the platform. So what we see is a future where freelancers alongside AI agents are getting work done on the platform and for us, we can charge a take rate on the work regardless of whether it's done by a human or machine or both.

Okay. One follow-up question that's been talked a lot about at this conference is how companies are deploying AI internally. I know it's not as much about external and growth and some of the topics we probably will go deeper on. But just are there any examples you can give or ways you want investors to think about the way you're driving productivity gains or efficiency gains in your own company as a result of AI?

Yes, absolutely. I mean I think everyone is implementing kind of AI tools on the back end. Obviously, we've been implementing tools to increase productivity around coding. We've seen about a 25% increase in productivity from our kind of engineering ranks through some of these AI implementations. I'm also seeing some nice benefits within my own organization in terms of starting to implement some of our kind of the LLM models that our teams have built to create natural language search in our own metadata in order to kind of enable more faster and more rapid analytics with internally. So there are lots and lots of opportunities there. And when we see these AI implementations, and I think a lot of CFOs are similar in this way as really productivity improvers, right? I've never been at a tech company where the road map was completely subscribed. And I think that's similar for everyone, right? We have road maps that we want to execute on and what we are starting to execute faster and seeing faster throughput, but it's really more of a productivity play.

Okay. You mentioned Business Plus, but I want to maybe go further up the funnel and talk about broadly about enterprise. You've seen a lot of good growth out of the enterprise. You're building a lot of enterprise solutions. Talk a little bit about repositioning the company for the larger enterprises over the long-term on the client side?

So we've had some incredibly exciting announcements around our enterprise business just in the past couple of months when we reported earnings in August, we announced 2 acquisitions a company called Bubty, which is a workforce management platform and a company called Ascen, which offers a full suite of kind of workforce solutions, staffing solutions. So this is a true game changer for us. Now if you think about our enterprise business, as it's been an evolution over the past several years, we have always been the expert and the best in the industry at offering IC talent, independent contractor talent. And that's really only about 10% of very large enterprise wallet spend. And we have this tremendous slate of very top-tier marquee enterprise companies in our list of clients. But up to now, because we were largely offering this IC lit contractual labor, we were only able to access about 10% of the spend. Now with the addition of Bubty and Ascen, we have access to the full suite of contingent labor products across staffing solutions, employer of record, agent of record and really the full slate of contingent labor. And so now the full wallet of enterprise spend is open to us. And I'll tell you, since we announced our new lifted entity just about 3 weeks ago, we're getting a tremendous number of inbounds, not just interest in our -- from our internal customers but actually RFP requests coming in from other companies out there. So it's a super exciting time for our business.

Maybe just following up on that. So you bought the 2 companies, you're integrating them, you're repositioning. How should investors think about the pathway towards the enterprise solutions being built out, deployed and you could see the full impact of it from a growth standpoint?

Yes, absolutely. Look, we are, of course, going after now very large kind of contracts. And these are really tens, if not $100 million contracts that we're working -- that we're going after. And so we've been very thoughtful about making sure people understand that there will be a few quarters of kind of both integration work as well as working through the kind of discussions and negotiations of these contracts. So we expect the major GSV in revenue growth coming from these 2 acquisitions to start to manifest in the back half of 2026. Now that said, we -- like I said, we said at the end of last year that we expect to resume both revenue and GSV growth on both the marketplace and the enterprise as we enter 2026, and we're still well on that track.

Okay. Interesting. Your take rate has continued to move higher and been a tailwind for the company and advertising, in particular, has been a bright spot for the company. Talk a little bit about what you've built that has had an impact on take rate for the business, looking backwards first. And what are your broad messages to investors about how take rate might evolve of the go forward?

Yes. If you look at our take rate compared to the rest of the industry, we are at the low end today. So our take rate on the marketplace is about 18.5%. Our total take rate is around 19.5%. And that really is kind of the lowest if you look across the industry. Staffing industry is going to be around about, call it, 30% kind of others in the industry are closer to the mid- to high 20s. So the bias of our take rate is up. And -- but we are very, very thoughtful about making sure that we are pricing to value as we continue to grow take rates. So people should expect that both GSV and take rate will be growth drivers for us as we enter 2026 and beyond. And we have a number of levers that are pushing that. As you mentioned, our ads products continue to grow. We have a currency called Connects, which is what our freelancers use to bid on jobs. That -- our Connects revenue continues to grow. It grew 20% in Q2 and is continuing on that pathway. We also have our subscription products, like I said, Freelancer Plus. We've also started to just recently, in May of this year, we announced or kind of revised our Ts and Cs on the freelancer side to have a variable fee on the freelancer side, anywhere from 0 to 15%, where it had been a 10% flat fee. Now the purpose of doing that is really to use the supply and demand dynamics on the platform to drive both take rate and GSV. So if you think about the way that our kind of categories work, we have some categories with very, very large supply where we can increase take rate. Other categories with lower supply where we made decreased take rate to grow GSV. We started experimenting with that in May with very, very nice successful results and we're really in the first inning of that work. And so we see that as a major driver, both of take rate and the GSV going into 2026. And then lastly, of course, is our Business Plus product which is very early days. We see higher spend from the customers who adopt that product and actually about 35% of Business Plus users are new to the platform, and we haven't even started to market it yet. So a lot of exciting things to come there from a take rate driver point of view.

And one question I do get from investors from time to time is there's an acknowledgment of that gap in take rate. How do you think about a take rate that's lower than the industry being a competitive advantage to some degree as opposed to closing a gap where you feel there's some economic value that's being added from a platform standpoint that should be realized. How do you think about that gap? Where do you talked about that as a team.

Yes. No. I mean I think it's an interesting question. That's why we're so focused on pricing the value. I mean the reality is that as we build out the value prop, if you look at the Business Plus product, what we offer there is access to the top talent on the platform, curation of talent, net 30 billing and we're actually offering even -- building even more feature sets, the ability to build teams more easily and gather kind of groups of freelancers in order to execute on bigger products. So this is opening up more of the kind of medium business TAM for us. And so as long as we continue kind of on that pathway to pricing to value, we see no reason that it can't continue to be both a competitive advantage and a growth driver for us.

Okay. You've talked about it a little bit, but beyond core marketplace, I think the other area that's increasingly getting some focus is what you can build and scale on the value-added services side on a multiyear view. So just thematically bring together how the company thinks about value-added services and sort of what that might do to the platform over the next 3 to 5 years?

Yes. Sure. I mean, look, I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity on the value-added services side that we are just at -- in the very early phases of thinking through and tapping into. We've already started. We launched a micro lending product for freelancers. We can do the same on the client side. And there's really a lot more to come there that we're honestly just at the beginning of our journey on.

Okay. Understood. We talked a little bit earlier about the progress you've made on margins. Just one last one here on the cost side. Anything to highlight about the way which you anchor investors to think about long-term margin potential for the business relative to where you are today?

Yes. I mean we've made tremendous strides on our margin journey. And this year, I think we're going to increase our adjusted EBITDA margin 6 points year-over-year. And so we're incredibly proud of that. We've also been able to do that while investing to resume growth in our business. So I kind of feel like we've been able to do it all. Now most of our growth investments that we've really kind of initiated over the past couple of years are really showing green shoots right now. Business Plus, our ads and monetization strategies, our enterprise business, all showing growth potential. And so you will see it start to slow our margin journey because we do want to both grow our margins, continue on that journey, but also grow our top line. So you'll see us as we go into 2026 continue to increase margin, but probably at a slower rate. And we reiterated our kind of longer-term goal of 35% adjusted EBITDA margin. No change there. We see that very much within our grasp while also growing top line.

Okay. Building on the margin dynamic, and you talked about it either growth investments or M&A or some of the choices you face as a management team. What are the priorities for capital allocation within the company. And what might change or how have they changed over the last 12, 18 months?

Yes. I mean I don't know that they've changed all that much. We have a very kind of focused set of organic growth investments that we are making, and they are the AI investments that I articulated, the growth of enterprise and then our ads and monetization strategies. And then beyond that, we've had a very successful M&A track record, right? We've done 4 acquisitions in the last 3 years, 2 of which were AI tech and talent acquisitions, first Headroom and Objective AI, both of which have been really the drivers behind our successes of our AI implementations on the platform and now most recently, our 2 enterprise acquisitions of Ascen and Bubty. So we're super pleased. These have been inexpensive. Ascen and Bubty cost us about 1/4 of free cash flow to acquire those 2 businesses, and they're going to really be huge growth drivers for our business. So we will continue to look at opportunities for smart high-yield M&A. And then beyond that, we'll continue to buy back stock and return capital to shareholders as we've been doing. We just, last week, announced our third $100 million stock buyback in 2 years. And so we're going to continue with that portfolio.

I know we only have a few minutes left together, but just bring it all together in terms of -- we've talked a lot during this conversation about the strategic priorities, the growth initiatives, elements of margin and capital. If you had to frame what the 2 or 3 biggest priorities for the company on the execution side and the road map are going forward, what are you guys most focused about? What are you most excited about as a team?

I mean I think I've sort of said it all. The opportunities with ongoing implementation of AI on the platform are enormous for us. And the fact that we're seeing this inflection of that category and the growth rate starting to just accelerate is super exciting for us. And -- but that's really only the beginning. The continuing to evolve Ooma to become more and more agentic and really help to execute work on the platform and seeing humans and AI side-by-side executing work is really the future. And to be honest, we're really one of the only platforms out there who are poised to be able to take advantage of this because our DNA is technology. If you think about all the other kind of contingent labor staffing solutions out there, these are very, very old tech stacks that simply don't have the capability to ingest this kind of technology that we do. So this is enormous for us. And then, of course, the enterprise TAM, our GSV in enterprise is about $300 million today. The TAM of that enterprise contingent labor business is $650 billion. So accessing that is huge. And then third and final, I guess, is our ads and monetization business and Business Plus, which is really our entry into kind of the TAM and the medium business segment. So lots of exciting things to come. And I think we're really -- we are in an inflection point in this business, and I hope people keep watching.

Yes. Well, really interesting stuff. I know we'll talk in the interim, but hopefully, you'll come back next year and we'll have this conversation all over again, and we'll check in on all these things that you're building and -- inside the company. Erica, thanks so much for coming to the conference. Please join me in thanking Upwork for being part of the conference this year.

Thanks, Eric.