Upwork Inc. (UPWK) Earnings Call Transcript

Welcome to Upwork's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note today's conference may be recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, [ Peter Sandberg ], Chief Business Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to Upwork's discussion of its second quarter 2026 financial results. Joining me today is Hayden Brown, Upwork's President and Chief Executive Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions, but first I'll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than those of historical fact. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and risks. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our Investor Relations website, as well as risks, and other important factors discussed in today's earnings press release. Additional information is also available in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, which was filed today. In addition, references will be made to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, non-GAAP operating expense, non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP diluted EPS, and free cash flow are non-GAAP financial measures, and all other financial measures are GAAP unless cited as non-GAAP. Information regarding non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, can be found in the press release that was issued this afternoon on our Investor Relations website at investors.upwork.com. Unless otherwise noted, reported figures are rounded and comparisons of the second quarter of 2026 are to the second quarter of 2025. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Hayden.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Upwork's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. In Q2, Upwork demonstrated strong execution in an operating environment that continues to be challenging. We delivered revenue of $191.7 million at the high end of our guidance range and adjusted EBITDA of $64.1 million, exceeding the high end of our guidance range. This was driven by disciplined cost management across our entire business. Our growth building blocks of SMB, enterprise, and AI are delivering results. We're driving momentum with larger clients, capturing higher value projects, and scaling our position as a platform of choice for complex AI-enabled work. In SMB, our prioritization of quality and customer value, not volume, continues to pay off. Business Plus continues to pace ahead of plan, with GSV growing 174% year over year as larger customers utilize Upwork for complex recurring needs. GSV per active client reached another record at $5,230, up 5% year over year, marking our eighth consecutive quarter of sequential growth in this metric. The core part of our SMB strategy is helping these businesses tap into AI for practical outcomes. For many of these customers, the constraint is not access to AI technology, but access to people who understand how to apply it to their specific industry, workflow, or business problem. Upwork is uniquely able to solve this at scale, combining a deep pool of AI-skilled talent with the marketplace infrastructure and trust that lets customers confidently tap into the human expertise they need. This is reflected in the 51% year-over-year growth we saw in our AI strategy and consulting category in Q2. SMBs are telling us that they're hiring AI experts to guide them in making their businesses more AI-native so they can grow and scale. In enterprise, our goals for [ Lifted ] remain on track and demand signals are strong. We initiated customer migrations to the new platform on schedule in June. We also saw positive developments with customers advancing through later stages of the sales process. The thesis around serving larger customers with this differentiated offering is working. Our focus on an expanded ability to support and grow larger customers that fit our ideal customer profile contributed to 7% year-over-year growth in GSV per enterprise account, the highest level it's been in more than three years. We also saw 29% year-over-year growth in GSV from employer of record, or EOR, solutions, which are made possible due to [ Lyft's acquisition of Ascend ]. Moving our employment infrastructure in the U.S. and Canada from third-party partners to [ Ascend's ] wholly-owned entities is garnering the improvement to our value proposition we anticipated, accelerating our sales funnel with the added benefit of improving our gross margins. We continue to expect [ Lifted ] to achieve approximately 25% year-over-year GSV growth in 2026. Our industry is in a period of transition as AI is changing work and transforming our marketplace in real time. The near-term AI and macro headwinds we identified last quarter have persisted in with an acceleration in the pace of AI-related automation. We now have greater visibility into the work transition underway and are updating our guidance outlook accordingly. Short-term headwinds do not change our confidence in the enduring value proposition of Upwork. While AI automation shrinks demand for some types of work on our platform, AI creates new demand in other areas. This is evident in the 22% growth in GSV from AI-related jobs in Q2, as defined by jobs stating an explicit AI need. These were up 5% quarter over quarter to reach an approximate annualized $330 million run rate. This quarter we saw indications that the quantum of AI-related work on Upwork is actually much greater. Many clients now simply expect the use of AI tools and capabilities without feeling the need to specify this in their job posts. For example, nearly half of talent in a recent survey reported that their most recent jobs were AI-related, despite only 16% of such jobs explicitly referencing AI in the post, demonstrating how prevalent AI-related work is becoming on Upwork. AI is also changing search. Our client acquisition strategy is to diversify beyond paid and organic Google Search to build a highly durable growth engine spanning emergent channels, including LLM-based search. Google's changes to search have dampened new customer acquisition with accelerated negative impact in Q2. Our SEO rankings have continued to step up, but the channel overall is smaller, underscoring the importance of the ongoing paid acquisition efficiencies we've been driving. Paid search has become our largest customer acquisition channel, and we have grown it in both relative and absolute size, while increasing our customer acquisition efficiency. Cost per new contract start improved 22% quarter-on-quarter, and this performance gives us confidence in increasing our paid acquisition investments for the balance of the year. We've also begun tuning our acquisition approaches for new channels that we expect to scale over time, like answer engine optimization, or AEO, and LLM-based referrals. While these channels are still nascent, third-party measures show that our share of AI-based mentions and referrals is 18%, percentage points higher than our closest peer. Additionally, our AI integrations are beginning to drive AI-based referral traffic and set us up for growth from these channels as OpenAI, Anthropic, and others enhance their approaches. These levers give us new paths to acquire customers in this unfolding AI and marketing landscape. The expansion of our acquisition channels goes hand in hand with how we're expanding our platform capabilities. With the proliferation of AI, we've been seeing clients trying to use AI agents to hire on Upwork for projects. A growing volume of clients come to Upwork to find people who can complete or fix a project they started with AI. Requests like turn my vibe-coded concept into a production website or humanize the translation output from this AI are growing, among many others. In the second quarter, we delivered key milestones on our product roadmap to support these use cases at scale. And today we announced the Upwork MCP server, our next capability for enabling agentic interactions on both sides of the marketplace, backed by the talent and job access, trust, guarantees, and quality that only Upwork offers. In Q2, we embedded Upwork directly into both ChatGPT and Claude. And with today's launch, Upwork talent and jobs are now accessible inside any AI tool that connects to our MCP. This lets both humans and their AI agents hire and collaborate with Upwork talent without leaving their own environments, while giving freelancers a way to win and deliver work without leaving their preferred AI tools. The demand for human taste, judgment, and quality assessment is increasingly commanding a premium. We're building these capabilities that let clients reach directly into our marketplace from inside the AI tools where they're already working to find the human expert they need the moment they need them. And as agents become a bigger part of how work gets done, we're building toward a marketplace where clients and their agents can hire not just human talent, but can also hire specialized AI agents and human agent teams. Bringing both sides of this emerging human and agent economy together on one platform is something no other marketplace can do at our scale. Innovations will help position Upwork as a key beneficiary of the AI shift that is underway. Now, I'll walk through our financial performance for the second quarter in more detail, as well as our updated guidance. Our financial results in Q2 demonstrate our capability to execute with discipline, driving profit expansion even as top-line volume reflects the transition underway. GSV was $966 million, reflecting the continued burn-off of lower-value, highly automatable work, the evolving impact of AI on new client acquisition, and a subdued labor market. Total revenue for the second quarter was $191.7 million, representing the high end of our guidance range, supported by strong, high-margin contributions from our ads and monetization levers, including dynamic pricing, Connects, and Business Plus. Revenue from these levers was up 15% year over year, and Connects and talent subscriptions now represent 15% of total revenue. This drove a strong take rate of 19.8% with highly accretive, high-margin revenue streams that also improve high-quality matching. Q2 active client count was 763,000. Active client count continues to be pressured by AI automation and search trends, labor market conditions, and our strategy to focus on client value over volume. Our average spend per contract reached an all-time high over any 12-month period in company history, presenting the sixth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth. GSV per new client grew year-over-year for another consecutive quarter, confirming that we are attracting clients with larger initial budgets and longer project horizons. Non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 77%, remaining near record levels as we manage infrastructure and support costs efficiently. Non-GAAP operating expenses reflected the early execution of our restructuring actions we announced in May, as the annualized $70 million of OpEx reduction we initiated is expected to generate approximately $40 million in realized savings in fiscal year 2026, allowing us to continuously fund our pillars in SMB, enterprise, and AI while expanding operating leverage. Adjusted EBITDA for Q2 was $64.1 million, exceeding the high end of our guidance range and delivering an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33.4%. Non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP diluted EPS were similarly strong, while our GAAP metrics reflect the impact of our Q2 restructuring charges. While our capital-light marketplace model consistently yields exceptional free cash flow conversion, this quarter's free cash flow of $35.9 million included the impact of one-time cash payments related to our restructuring. During the quarter, we closed a new $150 million revolving credit facility with a $50 million accordion. This positions us to repay the August 2026 convertible notes at maturity while supporting our disciplined capital allocation strategy, opportunistic M&A, and our share repurchase program. We repurchased approximately 164,000 shares in Q2 while we closed the revolving credit facility. Year-to-date, we have repurchased approximately 8.3 million shares. Turning now to our updated outlook, as I mentioned at the top of this call, the near-term AI and macro headwinds we identified last quarter have persisted throughout Q2 and into Q3, with an uptick in the pace of AI-related automation and impacts from SEO. We are adjusting our full year guidance on both the top and bottom line accordingly. For the full year 2026, we now expect revenue in the range of $730 million to $750 million. This assumes a heightened pace of AI-related automation and no improvements in the labor market. As planned, we will continue to expand take rate this year as part of our overall growth story. We expect full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA of approximately $225 million to $235 million, which represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 31% at the midpoint. This is driven by the flow through of our reduced revenue outlook alongside planned marketing spend. We expect full year 2026 non-GAAP diluted EPS to be between $1.38 and $1.43. Our updated guidance also assumes stock-based compensation of approximately $60 million to $65 million for the full year 2026. For the third quarter, we expect to generate revenue in the range of $176 million to $184 million and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $50 million to $54 million, which represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 29% at the midpoint. We expect Q3 non-GAAP diluted EPS to be between $0.31 and $0.33. Our underlying metrics, including record GSV per active client and continued Business Plus and AI work growth, confirm Upwork's strong value proposition, even in a changing market. Our product innovations and tailored offerings for larger customers are deepening our moat, and we continue to operate with financial discipline. We're navigating the near-term impacts of this significant evolution in how work gets done, while continuing to build Upwork to capture the demand, talent, and economic opportunity that this new era of work offers. Thank you for your continued support.

We are now ready to open the call to questions. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Ronald Josey of Citi. Your line is open.

Hayden, I had two questions, one on operations. And you talked about the challenging operating environment continuing. We'd love to hear more about the view and the visibility, and then more insights on the SEO challenges that you mentioned. And then some interesting data came out today, or at least a press release around the MCP server. Wanted to understand directly how that might impact the business going forward just given the AI benefits.

Thanks, Ron. So from a visibility standpoint, you know, we are really in the midst of a transition of work broadly. And what we're seeing is that our decisions, including our growth strategy and our effective cost management, are enabling us to navigate this situation from a real position of strength. The trend we saw this quarter is really a continuation of last quarter, but with an acceleration in the AI automation of very low complexity work and further deterioration on Google SEO, especially notable in the non-brand channel. And that's understandable given that demand for less complex work is shrinking as customers embrace AI, and this is just flowing through to our platform. But the important thing here is it really is an evolution with a situation that's quite fluid. We are already seeing really great green shoots that our strategy is working, and this is showing us what Upwork will look like as this transition unfolds. We can see that Upwork will be home to a lot of new work. AI-relevant work is already a big and enduring part of Upwork. We're seeing this with $330 million of GSV run rate in our AI categories. And as I mentioned a few moments ago, this is really an undercount because there's a lot more AI usage that is de facto across the platform. We can also see that on the other side of this transition, projects are becoming much bigger. This is how we've seen eight consecutive quarters of increased GSV per client. And it's not just a mix shift, we are actually seeing increases in things like the length of hourly work contracts, which hit a record of 100 hours on average this quarter. The final thing that's really going to be a hallmark of the new Upwork on the other side of this are these new channels and the new participants in those channels. And that speaks to the MCP part of your question, which I'll answer in a moment. With the launch of the MCP, you know, we really are stepping into new AI-first client acquisition strategies, which started working already with the integrations that we made in the last few months with Claude and ChatGPT. But this now opens Upwork to integrating agents and agent participants on both sides of our marketplace in a very at-scale way. So for us, the good news is we know how to navigate through these changes. It's in the DNA of our company to navigate changes and work. And we are very focused on just executing through them and seeing our strategies scale. Now, to your question about SEO, I would say these are industry-wide trends that are hitting the business. And so the impact to us is very similar to what we're seeing, I think, across our peer group. Specifically, Google has changed SEO referrals and the layout of the search page so that many fewer searches on Google result in any kind of referral to any kind of business. And that's really what's weighing on new client acquisition. And of course, it's coming at a moment that's kind of compounding the impact because the labor market is subdued, AI work is happening, and this is happening kind of all at the same time. The good news is we've done a lot to counter this, and that includes rebuilding our marketing funnels for this new world. As I mentioned earlier, paid acquisition is really doing well for us in Q2, and that's leaving us the confidence to increase our marketing spend by approximately $5 million to $10 million incrementally in the back half of the year. These new acquisition channels around AI are the future really for organic low-cost acquisition that really lets us integrate into these endpoints and get customers right where the work is happening. And maybe that's the right transition to answer your MCP question because the reason we built this is not just to create this new demand channel, it's actually in response to seeing agents already coming to our website, trying to do work on behalf of clients. This has been a fascinating phenomenon that started to grow, and previously they couldn't get very far because of our restrictions on agent activity. Now with the MCP server, Upwork can be called by and embedded into any AI tool that a client wants or a freelancer is using. So this really lets clients do more in terms of their job posting activity, their hiring activity, getting the benefit of both Upwork and their favorite AI tools together in one place. It also lets freelancers do more in terms of managing their proposals, their projects, client communications inside their own AI tools, and lets them actually operate as human supervisors to trusted AI tools that are integrated into Upwork and give clients and talent the full visibility, auditability, et cetera, of what those tools are being used for. So this is a launch that really was about going to where customers already are and not waiting for that demand to come to us, but really opening up more broadly by bringing Upwork into these channels. And this is something that really is unique to Upwork because one of the expectations that is coming along with this from clients is as they work in AI tools, they want things instantly. They want human impact, they want people on demand, they expect answers now. And because of our unique scale and talent breadth and quality, we can actually offer humans at scale on demand through these types of solutions, which no one else in the market can do.

Thank you, Hayden. Much appreciated.

And our next question comes from Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Maybe two if I could. You know, one I think is going to sort of dominate the debate around the space for a while is how do you think about the duration to get to the end state? Is the visibility that this transition is a 6- to 12-month transition or could it be more than a 12-month transition? I'm just curious for any framing you think about what the sort of countervailing factors in the business might lead to in terms of a mixture of these headwinds and tailwinds before we get back to some sort of more normalized levels of growth. And second, among the active client base you have today, how many of those active clients do you think will eventually be transitioned into high-end higher quality AI-driven work and how much of it is about rebuilding your active client base to be centered around where the nature of work on your platform is going for the longer term.

Yes, thanks, Eric. So in terms of your question around timing, you know, I think these things are incredibly hard to predict and, you know, it would be probably disingenuous for me to say that I know exactly how long this is going to take. But the important thing is it really is an evolution and it's a situation where on the other side of these changes, Upwork is actually emerging structurally as a beneficiary because it's unique to our platform, as I was just mentioning on the MCP side, for us to serve the market where it's going and really displace legacy and other solutions that can't do what we can do here. So we're staying laser focused just on our execution on these strategies that are working. And we see everything from our enterprise growing, our Business Plus offering up 174% year over year, and AI tailwinds in the parts of our business that really speak to AI work. All of those things will continue to scale and compound as we work through this. And that makes me incredibly optimistic about where we'll land. To your second part of your question, which was, sorry.

When you think about the active client base today relative to where the active client base needs to evolve, how much of your active clients today do you think are along this journey towards higher quality work as opposed to rebuilding the client base around higher quality AI-driven work when we think about over the next 12, 24 months?

Got it. Yes, I'd say on that front, this is really an expansion, not a replacement. We do see with very small business customers that we have today, those that are active in the Marketplace Basic plan, they are shifting their workloads to be more AI-oriented. And we see huge resonance with SMBs and larger customers who want the combination of both features and functionality of Business Plus and the AI kind of transformation that our business can offer. This is why we saw our AI strategy consulting practice or categories up significantly in the quarter. And I think this is just an example of how customers are using these new tools to do, you know, different types of work than they were doing a few months ago. So we really see it across all of our customer segments that they're leaning in more on these AI workloads and just they're changing what they do, and so that changes what they come to Upwork to do.

And our next question comes from Bernie McTernan of Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Two for me. First, just on the AI category work, we've seen a slowdown over the past two quarters growing 50% year over year in the fourth quarter, then 40% last quarter, then 22% now. I know there's some caveats you gave, Hayden, in your prepared remarks. Just anything you could dig in deeper there. And then second, the marketplace take rate, we were expecting to be down sequentially, and I think some pressure on like Connects and more ancillary revenue, but it came in actually higher sequentially. I'm assuming that's just Business Plus, but was there anything else to call out in the quarter and how to think about the marketplace take rate for the rest of the year?

Sure. So on the AI category, this is pacing now to $330 million run rate, as I mentioned. I want to emphasize this is really an undercount of AI work on Upwork because what we're seeing is customer behavior is changing. Customers who previously felt they needed to specify, hey, this is an AI job or I really need help with this AI project, now they just assume that that is expected and they don't even talk about it in their job posts. That's why in a survey we did just in the last few weeks, when we talked to talent, almost half of them said their most recent project was an AI-related effort. Whereas when we looked at the job posts and what we would capture in this AI category metric, only 16% of jobs specifically mentioned from clients that they wanted AI help. So there's just a transition happening in the ecosystem broadly where AI is now permeating all types of work. And I think that is what's reflected more than anything in the metric here. In terms of the marketplace take rate trends, we did have some success with our ad monetization efforts in Q2, and we will continue to expand on those in Q3 and Q4. So the expansion of things like dynamic pricing on freelancer fees and some other things were some of the big contributors to the over-performance and take rate and our outlook is for take rate to continue to step up in the back of the year.

And our next question comes from John Byun of Jefferies. Your line is open.

This is [ John ] on behalf of [ Brent Thill ]. Question on [ Lifted ], you mentioned that it's on track, it's still growth, GSV 25%, and guess that the employer of record category did very well. I'm wondering if there's anything more you could share about the migration there, the different project categories that's able to achieve in the pipeline, how it's building.