UK platform for freelancers, &Friends is merging with Cavalry Freelancing, Asia Pacific’s (APAC) freelancing platform for advertising and digital professionals.
The Sydney-based platform will become part of &Friends and will cover services including sourcing, onboarding, managing and payment of talent across the world.
Cavalry co-founder and &Friends Co-CEO Dave Bentley said that while the concept started as a marketplace, the team quickly realised this was only part of the solution.
“We realised that a great marketplace was only one piece of the talent puzzle for companies, the talent challenge is far broader, and requires a more holistic approach.
“The fact is that 90 per cent of companies know they need to build a more agile and adaptive workforce, but less than 80 per cent are actually able to find the solution to tackling this, by doing anything about it.
“This inertia is because the problem has traditionally been hard to solve, getting filed under ‘too hard’.
“The merge with &Friends enables us to give our clients the holistic solution they need – binding every stage of the talent journey – including sourcing, onboarding, managing and payment – into a frictionless customer experience that takes away the pain, time and cost.”
As part of this deal, &Friends will be able to enter the APAC market and Cavalry will get access to the global mart for freelancers.
&Friends CCO, Matt Carroll, said “Right now the demands being placed on the creative industry are unprecedented – with businesses being challenged to produce more output than ever – faster and more cost-efficiently. The traditional response to this is that it’s ‘not possible’. So we challenged ourselves to create a tool that makes it possible. By combining the expertise and experience of Cavalry and &Friends, we believe we’ve done that.”
