Key takeaways
This guide covers what Lifted does, who it is for, how it relates to Upwork, how it fits alongside your VMS or MSP, and how to get started.
Lifted, an Upwork Company, is a tech-enabled contingent workforce supplier that sources and engages talent for large enterprises. It offers solutions to running the gamut of contingent workforce engagement types, including independent contractors, Agent of Record, Employer of Record, staff augmentation, and outsourcing solutions, and works inside your existing program and does not replace your VMS or MSP.
Lifted's average time-to-fill is under 3 days, and it is typically 10% to 30% cheaper than traditional suppliers.
If you run a contingent workforce program, or you are about to, you have probably heard the name Lifted, an Upwork Company, and wondered what sits behind it. This guide explains what Lifted is and walks through the questions we hear most, so feel free to jump to yours, or see the short version of how Lifted fits inside a contingent program.
What is Lifted, an Upwork Company?
Lifted, an Upwork Company, is a tech-enabled contingent workforce supplier that helps enterprise organizations rapidly source and compliantly engage any type of contingent talent worldwide. Thanks to its proprietary technology, Lifted can do this without the high markups of traditional suppliers while also offering services aimed at helping companies meet their compliance goals like reducing misclassification risk, backed by contractual indemnification and other commitments under Lifted’s compliance model. Lifted enables enterprises to engage independent contractors, either directly or through an agent of record (AOR), hire employees through an employer of record (EOR), and add augmented talent or fully outsourced teams. Lifted handles everything from sourcing to global payments and plugs into existing vendor management systems (VMS) or managed service provider (MSP) programs when needed.
New to the ‘tech-enabled contingent workforce supplier’ label? Our post on what a tech-enabled contingent workforce supplier is is a good next read.
What does Lifted, an Upwork Company, do?
Lifted, an Upwork Company, helps enterprises source and engage every type of contingent talent in one place, through whichever model fits the work: independent contractors engaged either directly by the enterprise or through Lifted’s Agent of Record (AOR) offering, employees hired through its Employer of Record (EOR) and staff augmentation services, or leave the engagements to Lifted and get work done via SOW-driven outsourced teams through Lifted’s Outsourced Solutions. Lifted gives hiring managers and functional leaders one route to the talent they need, and program leaders one supplier to manage instead of several.
Worker type | What Lifted, an Upwork Company, does |
|---|---|
Sources talent from Lifted’s network or onboards freelancers you already work with, then supports onboarding, contracting, and payment | |
Engages independent contractors on your behalf, handling worker classification, contracts, and payment, with each engagement backed by contractual indemnification under Lifted’s compliance model | |
Facilitates employment of talent engaged as employees through an Employer of Record, supporting payroll, benefits, and local employment compliance while you direct the day-to-day work | |
Adds external talent to your existing teams to close skills gaps or cover spikes in workload | |
Builds, manages, and delivers outcome-driven teams for a defined function or project under one contract |
Which worker type fits your needs usually depends on the work, the country, state or region, and the facts of each engagement, so it helps to talk it through with your own legal, tax, and HR advisors.
Continue reading: AOR vs. EOR: what is the difference and which does your enterprise actually need?
Has Lifted, an Upwork Company, been recognized by industry analysts?
Yes. Everest Group, an analyst firm that evaluates service providers through its PEAK Matrix assessments, has recognized Lifted twice since its August 2025 launch. In 2026, it named Lifted a Leader in its Freelancer Engagement and Management System (FEMS) PEAK Matrix Assessment and a Leader in its Contractor of Record (CoR) and Contingent Employer of Record (CEoR) Solutions PEAK Matrix Assessment 2026.
What does that mean for you? PEAK Matrix assessments score providers on market impact and on vision and capability, and the CoR and CEoR assessment, the first time Everest evaluated the two as one combined category, looks at how much classification, contracting, and payment work a provider automates versus handles manually. It is one outside signal for your shortlist, best paired with your own evaluation.
How does Lifted, an Upwork Company, source talent?
Lifted allows enterprises to source talent in three ways: a) through its global network of 18M+ active profiles across 10K+ distinct skills, b) through freelancers you already know and onboard in one flow, or c) through a mix of both. You can also build branded talent pools, which are curated groups of talent under your company’s brand. Hiring managers and functional leaders can return to these pools for future projects, rather than starting each search from scratch. And if the person you need isn’t already in Lifted’s network, Lifted’s team of expert recruiters can help find them, anywhere in the world.
Finding someone is only half the story. In practice, large enterprises tend to care about two things: a) access, meaning the ability to reach a deep pool of talent when they need it, and b) the ability to engage, meaning issuing a contract and paying that person compliantly, wherever they are.
“If you are a large enterprise company and you want to engage with independent contractors, in the end you care about two things: access and ability to engage.”
Ernesto Lamaina
General Manager, Lifted
Access is where Lifted’s talent network, branded talent pools, and recruiting team come in. The second half, ability to engage, depends on how you and the talent work together. Through Agent of Record (AOR), Lifted engages and contracts independent contractors on your behalf, backed by contractual indemnification under Lifted’s compliance model. Through Employer of Record (EOR), Lifted supports hiring someone as an employee in-country. If you prefer to manage your own pool of freelancers, Lifted helps you source and onboard them. Jump to the question “How does Lifted, an Upwork Company, handle contracts, payments, and reporting after talent is engaged?” for the details.
Where can Lifted, an Upwork Company, engage talent?
Lifted can compliantly engage talent in 180+ countries. Customer projects show how that plays out: Hitachi Energy worked with specialists engaged through Lifted in 24 countries during its rebrand, and Jumio expanded its IT capacity across 10 countries. What is available for a given worker type in a given country depends on local requirements, so it is worth confirming your locations with Lifted and your own advisors early in the conversation.
How does Lifted, an Upwork Company, handle contracts, payments, and reporting after talent is engaged?
Once someone is on board, Lifted supports contracting for the worker type, with prebuilt onboarding workflows tailored by worker type and country and e-signature for contracts, NDAs, and other documents. Lifted supports payment in local currencies, depending on worker type and country, collects tax forms such as W-8 and W-9 where needed, and can tie payments to approved milestones.
On the reporting side, managers can follow assignments, milestones, and approvals in one dashboard, and smart alerts can flag overruns, inactivity, or compliance issues early. Finance gets one consolidated spend report and one consolidated invoice, which can make it easier to see what contingent talent costs across worker types and to close the month without reconciling a separate invoice for every worker.
Is Lifted the same as Upwork, and who owns it?
Lifted is not the same as Upwork, even though the two are connected. Lifted, an Upwork Company, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Upwork Inc. It launched on August 19, 2025, runs under its own brand, and focuses on enterprise contingent workforces. The idea grew out of what enterprise customers kept asking for. They were already finding highly skilled talent through Upwork, and wanted a more complete way to engage that talent, plus other types of contingent workers, without having to piece together several suppliers. Lifted was created to bring sourcing, contracting, and workforce management together for every type of contingent work, helping enterprises take the next step without disrupting what’s already working.
Lifted’s capabilities are underpinned by its acquisitions of Bubty and Ascen. Bubty brings flexible infrastructure to manage many engagement models in one place, and Ascen supports fast, compliant hiring across global markets.
Want the full story behind the name change and the acquisitions? Read Upwork Enterprise is now Lifted, an Upwork Company™.
Who is Lifted, an Upwork Company, for?
Lifted, an Upwork Company, is built for enterprises that need help sourcing or engaging any type of contingent talent anywhere in the world, whether or not they run a formal contingent workforce program. Today it serves 300+ enterprise customers. Inside those companies, hiring managers and functional leaders get one route to talent across worker types, and contingent workforce program and procurement leaders get one supplier that works alongside their existing VMS or MSP.
Lifted specifically serves large enterprises with:
Complex contingent workforce sourcing needs: Organizations hiring external talent across multiple business units, worker types, and geographies, often managing decentralized hiring demands and significant contingent workforce spend.
Global worker engagement and compliance requirements: Multinational enterprises engaging independent contractors, employees, and project-based talent across countries, requiring compliant classification, contracting, onboarding, management, and payments.
Established workforce management infrastructure: Enterprises operating existing VMS, MSP, procurement, and HR systems that need a specialized workforce partner to integrate with their infrastructure while maintaining centralized visibility, control, and reporting.
For stakeholders across the enterprise, Lifted provides:
For hiring managers and functional leaders: A single, fast route to source and deploy independent contractors, EOR talent, augmented staff, and project-based teams without navigating supplier sprawl.
For procurement & contingent workforce program leaders: A unified supplier easily managed directly alongside existing VMS and MSP programs, eliminating rogue spend and consolidating vendor contracts.
For finance teams: A consolidated global invoice and spend report across all worker types, standardizing cost tracking and budget forecasting.
For legal & IT teams: Tech-assisted classification backed by indemnification, standardized templates and contracting, and configurable onboarding workflows that integrate with existing enterprise security systems.
What kind of teams use Lifted, an Upwork Company?
Within large enterprises and multinational corporations, cross-functional teams across engineering and IT, marketing and creative, product, customer experience, finance, and HR all rely on Lifted to rapidly source and deploy contingent talent, and contingent workforce and procurement teams use it to bring those requests into one supplier relationship. A marketing leader and an engineering leader can use the same route to talent rather than each finding their own.
Some real-world enterprise applications include:
Marketing & creative: Global enterprise marketing teams, such as the creative organization within Hitachi Energy, utilize Lifted for multi-country creative execution, asset localization, and large-scale brand transformations.
IT & Engineering: Global IT and engineering departments, such as the IT organization at Jumio, deploy Lifted to scale technical operations, cover workload spikes, and access specialized engineering skills.
Product & Operations: Global HR and SaaS software companies deploy Lifted for rapid staff augmentation and project-based execution, delivering complex technical and product roadmaps without adding permanent full-time headcount.
Different teams and different worker types, but the same starting point: they needed outside help, fast.
How do teams use Lifted, an Upwork Company?
Enterprises across industries as different as energy, identity verification, telecommunications, and software work with Lifted* for different reasons. Here are four examples:
Hitachi Energy, outsourcing for a global rebrand: In early 2025, Hitachi Energy began aligning under the Hitachi parent brand, which meant refreshing thousands of creative, technical, and communications assets across 140+ markets while its own teams stayed focused on critical innovation programs. Lifted, then operating as Upwork Enterprise, launched repeatable, high-volume workstreams with specialists in 24 countries working across overlapping time zones, and gave Hitachi centralized visibility to keep quality consistent from market to market. The rebrand was completed on schedule across 140+ markets.
Jumio, on-demand IT talent: Jumio’s IT team was running 26+ concurrent projects with limited project management resources, a backlog of hundreds of unresolved support tickets, and some work due within 12 hours. Through Lifted, it expanded its IT capacity with talent across 10 countries, with an on-demand talent pool, contracts that could flex as projects changed, and the option to re-engage standout contributors, so leaders could focus on outcomes instead of managing tasks.
A leading U.S. telecommunications company, Employer of Record: During a pending merger, this company needed to bring on pre-identified technical and marketing talent across several states, quickly and without adding full-time headcount. With Lifted’s Employer of Record model supporting employment across those states, it activated contracts in days, set up flexible part-time and variable-hour schedules, and kept control over who it hired. The result was no increase in full-time headcount, with workers onboarded in roughly 2 to 3 days.
Mobileum, outsourced HR operations: Mobileum, a software company serving telecom operators in 52 countries, was running HR operations across 25 different systems, with no central global compensation or benefits function and about 1,800 employees spread across more than 450 job titles. It engaged Lifted, then operating as Upwork Enterprise, for outsourced services covering key HR operations, including a centralized HR Knowledge Center for employee and manager self-service, a global policy framework, and experienced program managers.
You can browse more customer stories on the case studies page or continue reading the Best practices for a Contingent Workforce Manager and Procurement.
*References to Lifted before August 2025 are to its earlier iteration as Upwork Enterprise. Lifted is a direct successor to Upwork Enterprise and serves the same clients.
How is Lifted, an Upwork Company, different from a staffing agency or an EOR?
A staffing agency typically fills roles, and an EOR typically employs workers, so each is often one tool for one job. Lifted is one tech-enabled supplier across worker types, with its own talent network and technology, so a single relationship can cover whichever way an engagement needs to be structured.
Picture a hiring manager who finds the perfect contractor (let’s call him John), and then learns the engagement needs a different structure than planned. With a one-model supplier, the team may lose weeks, and sometimes the candidate (in this case, John), while it hunts for another vendor. With Lifted, the change can often happen inside the same relationship, so contracts, systems, and reporting stay in one place. When you compare suppliers, it can help to ask what happens when your needs change halfway through.
“…What happens if John is not available? What happens if now you have five more projects and you need to source more people? With Lifted, essentially it’s all right there.”
Ernesto Lamaina
General Manager, Lifted
In other words, a change in plan does not have to mean a new vendor.
What makes Lifted, an Upwork Company, different from other HR technology vendors?
Most HR technology isn’t built specifically for the contingent workforce. Some tools focus on one job, such as classifying a worker, running payroll in a country, or managing freelancers you have already found. Lifted, an Upwork Company, is built for contingent talent, and it’s a tech-enabled supplier rather than a technology company. It brings sourcing, contracting, classification services, payment, and reporting into one relationship across independent contractors, Agent of Record, Employer of Record, and staff augmentation.
For you, that can mean one relationship across worker types instead of several.
How does Lifted, an Upwork Company, work with my VMS or MSP?
Lifted is designed to sit alongside your VMS or MSP program, not to replace it, and you don’t need to swap either one out to work with Lifted. Lifted onboards like any other supplier in your program, so your existing approvals, reporting, and governance can stay in place.
Here is how that works in practice. Many enterprise programs use a traditional VMS like SAP Fieldglass, VNDLY, or Beeline (sometimes managed by an MSP), for staffing agency requisitions, but find their existing setup doesn’t handle direct-sourced or independent contractor sourcing, compliance, global classification, or agile onboarding.
Lifted doesn’t replace your tech stack. Instead it plugs directly into it as an accredited supplier. A requisition can originate in SAP Fieldglass, backed by your MSP’s governance rules. Behind that request, Lifted handles talent sourcing, classification, contract execution (as AOR or EOR), and compliant talent payments. Lifted’s open APIs can connect into your HRIS and ERP systems to sync purchase orders and approvals, so finance receives one consolidated invoice rather than processing hundreds of individual contractor payouts.
Many programs also bring their own pre-identified talent and supplier pools into Lifted, alongside talent Lifted sources, so everything is managed in one place.
How fast is Lifted, an Upwork Company, and how much can it save?
Lifted’s average time-to-fill is under 3 days, and existing talent can be redeployed in ~30 minutes. Lifted is also generally 10x faster and typically 10% to 30% cheaper than traditional suppliers. Your own results will depend on your roles, countries, and program. For Employer of Record engagements in the US, average onboarding is 1.3 days, with 77% of workers onboarded in under a day.
Side-by-side: what to expect with Lifted, an Upwork Company, vs. a legacy supplier
Evaluation criterion | Legacy supplier | Tech-enabled supplier (Lifted, an Upwork Company) |
|---|---|---|
Sourcing method | Often manual recruiter networks and slower searches | Proprietary technology and an 18M+ active talent pool, or your own pre-identified talent onboarded in one flow |
Time-to-fill | Typically days to weeks, with manual shortlists | Instant shortlist, under 3 days average time-to-fill, and about 30 minutes to redeploy existing talent |
Cost and rate transparency | Often layered markups and limited visibility into what each engagement costs | Typically 10% to 30% cheaper than traditional suppliers, with visibility into each engagement |
Compliance model | Often fragmented, with different contracts and processes for each vendor | Standardized contracts and technology-validated processes with expert oversight, and for Agent of Record, engagements backed by contractual indemnification under Lifted’s compliance model |
Data and spend visibility | Often fragmented across agencies, with spend reports to piece together | One place to access assignments, milestones, and approvals, with flexible ways to view and report on spend and invoicing across all worker types |
Fit with your existing program | Often no technology behind it, just a supplier, so you get less automation and slower turnaround | Integrates as a supplier inside your existing VMS (e.g., SAP Fieldglass, Beeline) and MSP program |
Does Lifted, an Upwork Company, provide legal advice?
No. Lifted is a supplier, not a law firm, and Lifted doesn’t provide legal or tax advice, so decisions regarding your compliance goals and how best to meet them generally stay with you and your own legal, tax, and HR advisors. That said, you would not be figuring it out alone: Lifted’s team can walk you through how engagements of each worker type work through Lifted, and for Agent of Record engagements, Lifted’s classification services combine technology with expert review to determine the appropriate engagement type for the talent and work you bring to Lifted under that offering. Because every engagement depends on its own facts, it helps to bring your advisors into the conversation early.
How do I get started with Lifted, an Upwork Company?
The simplest way to start is with the worker type that matters most to you right now. Want to bring in freelancers you already work with, or source new ones? Start with independent contractors. Need a partner to engage independent contractors on your behalf, including worker classification services? Look at Agent of Record. Engaging talent as employees of an Employer of Record, without setting up a local entity? See Employer of Record. Adding capacity to an existing team? Take a look at staff augmentation. Handing off a whole function or project? Outsourcing is the place to begin.
Because Lifted onboards like any other supplier, you can begin with one use case and add others later without changing your existing program. If you would rather talk it through first, talk to our experts, or see how Lifted works inside your program.
Author
Lee Willoughby
Senior Marketing Director, Lifted
Lee Willoughby is the Senior Marketing Director at Lifted, an Upwork company helping enterprises source, engage, and manage contingent talent across every contract type. With a background as a co-founder and workforce technology entrepreneur, Lee focuses on the future of contingent workforce management, helping organizations navigate the complexities of global talent, compliance, and workforce transformation.
This content is for general informational purposes only, and is not intended to be and should not be viewed as legal or tax advice. Readers should contact their attorney or tax professional to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal or tax matter. Information discussed can change frequently, and Lifted cannot guarantee that all information is current at all times.
