Malt’s freelance community in UK booms to 15,000 members

One year after arriving in the UK market, Malt has grown its freelance community to more than 15,000 experts. The firm arrived in the UK via its acquisition of freelance marketplace Comatch.

Malt was founded in 2013 by Vincent Huguet and Hugo Lassiège, as the pair sought to tap into the burgeoning freelance talent market. Their new solution aimed to supply workers with a greater level of choice in who they performed tasks for – while also enabling companies to quickly fill talent gaps on an interim basis.

In the years since, Malt has grown into a successful scaleup, with 600 employees in eight countries. Presided over by CTO Lassiège and co-CEO Huguet – along with fellow co-CEO Alexandre Fretti who joined in 2023 – the organisation now supports 60,000 companies of all sizes link up with a community of more than 500,000 freelancers.

With the 2022 acquisition of Comatch, a marketplace specialising in independent consultants, Malt became present in eight new markets – Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UAE, and the UK. In particular, the UK market now features prominently in Malt’s ambitious new plans, for its second decade in business.

Malt has already realised a turnover of more than €400 million, making it Europe’s biggest freelance marketplace. By 2024, however, Malt aims to reach the €1 billion mark.  

Key to that huge milestone will be the firm’s UK presence – with its addition of Comatch having helped take its community of freelancers in Britain to more than 15,000 professionals. With that addition of consulting and strategy advisory talent into its pool, it has added a lucrative new capability to its services.

At the same time, the organisation’s powerful search engine, intuitive UX, and continued dedication to supporting freelancers will also play an important role. Malt regularly provides content, networking events, training to its members, resulting in a continuous stream of new freelancers – and a 39% increase in new sign-ups in the last year alone.

Malt is also building upon this technology with new innovations, to help improve its match-making capacity. Recently this saw a self-learning search algorithm deployed to ensure clients can quickly find freelancers for any project, tools to help consolidate administration and payment, and integration with over 85 ERP systems – helping provide a seamless connection with existing company processes.

Commenting on the last decade, co-CEO Huguet said, “When we founded Malt, the market was heavily dominated by recruitment agencies who tended to prioritise their clients above everything else, neglecting the people who would actually carry out the projects. On the contrary, we wanted to treat freelancers as stakeholders from the outset, enabling them to become a part of a community, helping them to find new clients and making sure their payments are secure. This is how Malt developed as a community-focused marketplace.”