Braintrust raises $18M to build fairer model for freelancers

Braintrust is a user-owned talent network that is growing fast and reaching real scale just eighteen months after launching the public beta of the protocol last June. $37 million in Gross Service Value (GSV) – what Clients pay Talent – has flowed through the network, with nearly twice that contracted for the coming months.

Braintrust serves the increasing demand for freelancers - they can aggregate the demand because it's a no-fee model. We can finally unbundle the trillions of dollars in the W2 stack.

Braintrust’s market cap is $315 million, its fully diluted market cap is $896 million, and in December, it announced a fresh $100 million token sale to Coatue, Tiger, and existing investors to fund grants to grow the ecosystem.  

The simple idea behind Braintrust is that it is a talent network that charges Clients an industry-low 10% fee and actually pays Talent a negative take rate by rewarding them with tokens, and that the only way for those things to change is for the users who would be impacted to vote to change them.