Freelancer.com moves into freight business with acquisition

Freelancing and crowdsourcing business Freelancer Limited (ASX: FLN) has moved into the freight and logistics market with the acquisition of Channel 40, an enterprise marketplace connecting freight owners with transport operators.

With the acquisition, the company announced the launch of Freightlancer.com, a global marketplace for freight, shipping and transportation spanning from complex enterprise haulage to consumer metro deliveries.

Channel 40 was started in 2016 by mining executive Tom Cavanagh, who also founded, and is CEO of, EMS Group, one of Australia's largest underground mining and tunnelling service providers.

Channel 40 primarily services the construction, mining, tunnelling, rail and oil and gas industries, with over 6,000 freight operators in its marketplace. In the last 12 months, Channel 40 has shipped over $4.5 million of freight within Asia Pacific, as well as internationally to the United States and Europe.

"We are excited to announce both the acquisition of Channel 40 and the launch of Freightlancer, our global marketplace for freight, shipping and transportation," says Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie (pictured).

"Freightlancer is powered by the world's largest human labour cloud of over 30 million freelancers, our rapidly growing Enterprise division and our global payments business Escrow.com.

"The acquisition of Channel 40 and the launch of Freightlancer.com represent the first productized vertical for Freelancer.com, specialising in end-to-end solutions within a single job area."

Channel 40 CEO Josh Mullens says the deal will allow the brand to scale up globally as part of the Freelancer.com brand.

"Our business and global domain expertise in transportation, shipping and logistics, combined with the global scale of the Freelancer.com and Escrow.com is a phenomenal combination."

Freelancer is the world's largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and jobs posted and it basically connects employers with freelancers in around 250 countries. Employers can go to the platform to hire freelancers to complete work in a variety of fields including software development and freelancers can bid to win these jobs.

In July, Freelancer released its half year results which revealed revenue was flat compared the prior corresponding period and revenue from its online payment services fell 28 percent to $3.1 million.

Gross payment volume (GPV) increased by just one percent on the Freelancer platform, but declined 24 percent for Escrow.com.

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Business News Australia