Creating Opportunity in 2025: Upwork's Year in Review

Creating opportunity in every era of work isn't just Upwork’s purpose; it's the standard we hold ourselves to. Here's how we delivered on it in 2025.

Putting AI to Work for Our Customers

The more work that happens on Upwork, the more opportunity we create. In 2025, we made the Upwork experience faster, smarter by embedding Uma™, our Mindful AI, into every step of how work gets discovered, scoped, and delivered.. Uma helps businesses articulate what they need, identifies the right talent to deliver it, and keeps the work moving from start to finish, in turn helping professionals earn more and build careers on their own terms. As we continue to innovate and expand these capabilities, our Mindful AI Principles keep us grounded, ensuring the technology we deploy works in the best interests of everyone on the platform

Helping Small Businesses Play Bigger

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), we launched Upwork Business Plus. At the center of it is Uma Recruiter, an always-available AI hiring partner that finds the right talent for a job, delivering a shortlist within six hours. It looks at the full picture, from talent skills and track record to rates and fit, so those busy SMB owners and team leads spend less time sorting through candidates and more time getting work done. It also gives customers instant access to the top 1% of talent on the platform.

For SMBs that have historically had to compete for specialized talent against much larger organizations with bigger budgets and dedicated recruiting teams, it’s a real change in what's possible and a more level playing field for everyone.

Investing in a Platform People Can Trust

In 2025, we updated core security policies, deployed smarter identity verification, and improved how we detect and act on policy violations at scale — combining automated systems with human reviewers who assess context and intent where it matters most. As a result, offers from malicious client accounts fell more than 90% year-over-year, and proposals from bad-actor freelancers dropped more than 80%.

We also launched the Account Health Hub, giving clients and talent a clearer, more centralized view of their account standing and a faster path to resolution when issues arise. 

Creating Opportunity Beyond Our Platform

Our commitment to opportunity doesn't stop with our platform. In 2025, the Upwork Foundation granted $800,000 to nine nonprofits across five continents focused on building those uniquely human skills, including creativity, critical thinking, and leadership, that we believe will only become more valuable in an AI-enabled global economy. The Upwork team also lent $90,500 in microloans to more than 4,000 entrepreneurs through Kiva, supporting borrowers in communities where access to capital can change the trajectory of a career.

Everything we did in 2025 had the end goal of creating opportunity and positively impacting our customers and broader community, and there's plenty more to share. Read the full 2025 Impact Report to see how these milestones reflect not only what we built, but how we built it: through a continued commitment to ethical business practices and long-term sustainability.