This week, Catalant Technologies, a Boston-based startup that connects companies with freelancers, announced it has received $35 million in fresh funding from VC firm Morningside Group. This brings the eight-year-old company’s total funding raised to more than $100 million, and will be used to scale its business and team to keep up with demand.
Catalant sees freelance professionals as a cost-effective, more agile alternative to traditional consulting firms, and helps companies find the right people and get the job done with its Expert Marketplace and SaaS product (which was launched last year). The company claims to work with 35 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, including major brands like Pfizer and DuPont.
Built In last caught up with Catalant at the very beginning of last year when it raised another $35 million round. Since then, the company says 2020 was a “watershed year” for its business, as demand for freelancers in strategic areas like supply chain, data analytics and project management hit record numbers on its platform. CEO and co-founder Pat Petitti says the industry has been going this way for years and the pandemic simply sped the process up.
“It’s no secret the consulting industry is ripe for disruption,” Petitti said in a statement. “I’m most excited to see organizations lean into the freelands economy for work that would previously have been reserved for slower, more expensive, and less agile alternatives. This helps businesses deliver on their strategic initiatives much faster, and it opens opportunities for the world’s best talent to make more money as freelancers.”
Catalant isn’t the only company in the freelance economy riding this wave. Two major players in this space, Fiverr and Upwork, experienced record growth last year due to an increase in demand for freelancers. Newer startups like Collective, a back office platform for freelancers, and Lili, a freelancer-friendly banking app, have been getting some traction, too, amid the gig-work boom.
“[W]e foresee the current pandemic and recession may cause even more people to seek independent work,” Lili’s co-founder and CEO Lilac Bar David told Built In when the company raised its $10 million Series A in June. “The future of work is evolving toward independence, with more people feeling empowered to work for themselves, either full-time or as a side gig, and we definitely think this is a trend that’s here to stay.”
Now, with this fresh funding in its coffers, Catalant seems poised to make the most of this new reality in the corporate arena.
