Upwork Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Upwork delivered a record Q2 with $194.9 million in revenue, $32.7 million in net income, and 29.3% adjusted EBITDA margin, and raised full-year revenue and EBITDA guidance.
  • Positive Sentiment: AI platform enhancements drove a >$80 million lift in GSV, AI-related work grew 30% year-over-year, and new features boosted average spend per contract by 4% and Connects revenue by 3%.
  • Positive Sentiment: The Business Plus plan saw active clients increase 45% quarter-over-quarter and GSV surge 190% quarter-over-quarter, with 35% of these clients new to Upwork.
  • Positive Sentiment: Upwork’s enterprise strategy advanced with the acquisition of Bubtea and pending purchase of Ascend, creating a full-stack contingent workforce solution targeting a $650 billion TAM and expected to be EBITDA-accretive by 2027.
  • Negative Sentiment: Enterprise revenue declined sequentially due to budget cuts at large customers and a pause in traditional enterprise sales, though growth is anticipated to resume in 2026.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Upwork Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Upwork's Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session.

Operator

Please note that today's conference may be recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, Samuel Meehan, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, and welcome to Upwork's discussion of its second quarter twenty twenty five financial results. Joining me today are Hayden Brown, Upwork's President and Chief Executive Officer and Erica Gesser, Upwork's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, they 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 security laws.

Speaker 1

Forward looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results may 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 the risks and other important factors discussed in today's earnings press release. Additional information will be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10 Q for the quarter ended 06/30/2025 when filed.

Speaker 1

In addition, reference will be made to certain non GAAP financial measures. 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, comparisons of the 2025 are to the 2024. Adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, and free cash flow are non GAAP financial measures, and all other financial measures are GAAP unless cited as non GAAP. Now I'll turn the call over to Hayden.

Speaker 2

Good afternoon, and welcome to Upwork's second quarter twenty twenty five earnings call. Upwork delivered another record quarter on both the top and bottom lines. We generated our highest ever Q2 revenue of $194,900,000 with our outperformance driven by AI enhancement of the platform, accelerated client hiring in AI related work, ads and monetization strategies and our thriving Business Plus offering. We also exceeded our guidance by generating net income of $32,700,000 and adjusted EBITDA of $57,100,000 resulting in a 16.8% profit margin and 29.3% adjusted EBITDA margin. Based on our performance in the first half of the year and positive momentum, we are raising our full year guidance for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA.

Speaker 2

Our strong results and increased guidance underscore the success of our AI and M and A strategies in attracting and converting larger clients in the marketplace. This increase is driven in part by a more than $80,000,000 in year lift in GSV attributable to our AI and customer experience enhancements. Our innovation velocity was on display in our summer twenty twenty five Upwork updates announced on July 23. This product release was rooted in our unique ability to combine the world's best human talent with cutting edge AI to deliver unparalleled outcomes and pioneering customer experiences. We are seeing the fruits of evolving Ooma, Upwork's Mindful AI, into a more fully capable, always on AI work agent.

Speaker 2

Clients can now leverage Ooma to interview talent on their behalf and find the right fit, saving them time on manual reviews. This capability also helps freelancers find work faster, interviewing on their own time, and showcasing their skills more effectively than a cover letter can. New Ooma powered Upwork video meetings generate transcripts, summaries, and action items, which enhance collaboration, propose project milestones, and turn meetings into real progress. We completed the integration of Objective AI's AI native search technology and released several core search and recommendation enhancements, including contextually aware Ooma powered search. These drove a 4% lift in average spend per contract and 3% increase in Connect's revenue compared to our prior feature set.

Speaker 2

Finally, a reimagined AI driven job posting experience provides tailored, actionable tips to clients based on our differentiated trove of work interaction data. And on the talent side, Ooma Proposal Writer enhancements led to a 58% increase in freelancers utilizing Ooma to submit a bid compared to the previous product experience. Our strategy to rapidly grow AI work across categories is also working, as GSV from AI related work accelerated to 30% year over year growth from 25% in the first quarter. Businesses are coming to Upwork to access our pool of 250,000 AI experts, offering more than three sixty five unique AI skills. This work spans everything from model tuning and generative design to LLM integration and prompt engineering.

Speaker 2

For example, one of the largest multinational CPG companies is tapping into AI developer talent on Upwork to build AI powered interactive personalized ordering systems and to redesign the user experience for some of the world's most recognizable brands. The number of clients posting AI jobs grew 38% year over year, a positive future GSV signal, as clients engaging in AI work spend more than three times as much as the average client on the platform. GSV from prompt engineering grew 51% year over year in Q2. And categories that not long ago seemed ripe for AI substitution, like accounting and bookkeeping, video and animation, and contract law, are actually being augmented and accelerated by AI tools, leading to category growth due to demand for human creativity and judgment. While we continue to see the simplest tasks and smallest projects substituted by AI in some categories, like writing and translation, our GSV is now outperforming expectations.

Speaker 2

We expect AI augmentation to continue across many categories on our platform, supporting growth of GSV per active client. With accelerating momentum in AI work and much higher average spend, AI is an important growth multiplier for us. In our marketplace, Business Plus, our premium plan for teams and larger SMB clients, continues to exceed our goals in attracting and expanding share of wallet with larger customers. Active Business Plus clients increased 45% quarter over quarter, while GSV from those clients surged 190% quarter over quarter. Importantly, Business Plus appeals to both existing customers as well as new prospects.

Speaker 2

35% of Business Plus clients in Q2 were brand new to Upwork. Business Plus's success is a key B TED for our strategy to serve larger businesses in our marketplace with a differentiated and tailored value proposition. Ads and monetization offerings were a strong contributor in the quarter, as revenue from these products grew 17% year over year, including 19% year over year growth in Connects revenue and 13% year over year growth in Freelancer Plus subscription revenue. These products empower freelancers to improve their visibility and increase the yield on their efforts, while also expanding our take rate. In the second quarter, we made huge strides on our strategy to expand our share of wallet with large enterprise customers, which is a transformational opportunity.

Speaker 2

Today, we are announcing two acquisitions by our new wholly owned Upwork Enterprise subsidiary. These acquisitions complete our feature set in Enterprise and, together with our existing capabilities, enable us to offer a unique, highly differentiated solution. We've always been the best in class provider of independent contractor talent and management for enterprises. To tap into the remainder of our clients' contingent work spend, spanning employer of record, staff augmentation, statement of work, and other contract types, we historically relied on EOR partners and workarounds to deploy our IC talent management solution for other contract types. While this approach enabled us to support a variety of programs for our clients, our reliance on partners and lack of a more versatile and deeply integrated workforce management solution limited our ability to deploy our tremendous talent pool against the full range of opportunities enterprise customers approached us with.

Speaker 2

We therefore made the decision to bring these critical capabilities in house. Doing so positions Upwork with a single, digitally native, contract agnostic, and global solution that holistically supports contingent work program needs. This is why I am so excited to share the update on our M and A progress today. In Q2, our wholly owned subsidiary acquired Bubtea, a contingent workforce management platform built to support large enterprises. Our enterprise subsidiary has also signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ascend, a digitally native employment solution for contingent W-two work.

Speaker 2

We expect that transaction to close in the second half of this year. This combination of assets completes our enterprise offering, bringing talent sourcing, contracting, and workforce management in a unified experience, purpose built for large companies and every type of contingent work. This is a powerful combination. It accelerates our ability to capture a greater share of the $650,000,000,000 contingent workforce TAM, and we expect it to begin driving meaningful GSV and revenue growth starting in late twenty twenty six. Underpinning all of this are rapidly expanding AI workflows across our company.

Speaker 2

Our focus and disciplined efforts to reinvent our processes with AI are increasing our internal efficiency and therefore margin profile, while allowing our teams to spend their time wisely on the highest impact work. Over 35% of our deployed code is now AI generated. And in our search team, fine tuned LLM evaluations of match quality have reduced our model iteration time and cost by over 70%. This is how we are now able to deliver faster, higher quality product releases. Q2 was a standout quarter.

Speaker 2

Our three pronged strategy centered on AI, ads and monetization and enterprise is exceeding our expectations and bolsters our confidence in a GSV growth outlook for 2026. Today, our platform is more powerful. Our customers are more engaged. Our team is more effective, and our opportunity is bigger than ever. I'd like

Speaker 3

to thank our incredible team for their talent and dedication and our customers for their trust and partnership. With that, I'll turn it over to Erica. Thanks, Hayden. We delivered an outstanding second quarter with revenue of $194,900,000 and better than expected performance across all financial metrics. The quarter's results clearly demonstrate the significant advancement of our AI efforts and product enhancements, resulting in growth of our core Marketplace business, including Business Plus.

Speaker 3

Our focused, disciplined approach to margin expansion while investing in growth was evident across our business as our adjusted EBITDA margin hit a new record high of 29.3%, exceeding our guidance range. This was driven by strong revenue outperformance alongside our continued cost optimization efforts, including internal investments in AI enablement. We are firmly on track to achieve our 35% adjusted EBITDA margin target, and we are raising our full year 2025 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. While the macro environment remains difficult to predict, we continue to outperform peers and our own plans while investing in future growth levers. Second quarter GSV of $1,000,000,000 was stronger than expected due to successful product improvements we've made to the marketplace, including Search and Match and Business Plus.

Speaker 3

We are encouraged by early positive signals that our GSV growth levers are beginning to bend the GSV curve. Average GSV per active client continued on its positive growth trajectory, rising 5% year over year and surpassing $5,000 for the first time since 2022. This marks the second consecutive quarter of positive year over year growth and the fourth consecutive quarter of sequential growth. Once again, GSV per active client grew year over year in every major client segment, with particularly strong growth of 16% year over year in our very large client segment. Our hours per contract in Q2 were also the highest ever, as our platform attracts larger jobs and more complex work.

Speaker 3

Our active client count continues to exhibit the cumulative effect of the top of funnel demand pressure that we have noted for the past few quarters. We are addressing the challenging demand environment by focusing on quality over quantity and targeting our marketing spend on higher LTV clients. In recent quarters, we've also been extensively testing new marketing channels and are seeing strong yield from alternative channels to traditional SEM and SEO. The success of this strategy is evident as overall spend per contract grew for the third consecutive quarter, increasing 11% year over year in Q2 and representing our highest ever average spend per contract over any 12 period. This, along with the enhanced AI powered customer experience improvements we've been building over the past few quarters, contributed to Q2 Marketplace revenue growth of 2.3% year over year.

Speaker 3

As Hayden mentioned, we are excited to announce two strategic acquisitions by a newly formed Upwork enterprise focused subsidiary. The combination of these assets is a game changer for our customers. Having a full stack, contract agnostic enterprise solution will solve key customer pain points and enable us to unlock this massive enterprise market in an expanded way. We expect these deals will have a minor GSV and revenue benefit to the second half of this year, with an expected mid single digit contribution to revenue. The combination of additional OpEx from these new businesses, as well as integration and expansion costs, will have a dilutive impact of approximately $10,000,000 on adjusted EBITDA in the back half of 2025, all of which is contemplated in our raised adjusted EBITDA guidance.

Speaker 3

We expect these acquisitions to contribute to top line growth in 2026 and to be meaningfully GSV revenue and adjusted EBITDA accretive in 2027. Longer term, we expect this strategy to be a strong driver for both top and bottom line growth. In the second quarter, enterprise revenue was down sequentially due to ongoing pressure from internal budget cuts at a handful of larger customers, some of whom had prominent layoffs in the first half of the year. As a reminder, we also paused the majority of our sales efforts on our traditional enterprise plans in the first half of the year as we retooled our enterprise strategy. We expect the enterprise business, now part of our newly formed subsidiary, to return to growth in 2026 on the back of the new capabilities the two acquisitions will contribute to our offering and our renewed sales approach.

Speaker 3

Our marketplace take rate was 18.5% in Q2 compared to 18% in the 2024 as we successfully introduced new ways to price to value in the marketplace. While successful new pricing tests have led to strength in take rate in the first half of the year, we expect relatively stable take rates through the rest of 2025 as we continue to test approaches to drive both GSV and revenue in 2026 and beyond. Non GAAP gross margin reached 77.8% as we execute disciplined cost management across every part of our business. Non GAAP operating expense was $98,900,000 in the second quarter or 51% of revenue compared to 58% of revenue in the 2024. Adjusted EBITDA was $57,100,000 in the second quarter, leading to a record second quarter adjusted EBITDA margin of 29.3%.

Speaker 3

We reported GAAP net income of $32,700,000 for the second quarter, a 47% increase over Q2 twenty twenty four and a record for any second quarter in our company's history. These all time highs in profitability and cash generation are enabling us to strategically put capital to work to grow our business and further extend our market leadership position, exemplified by today's marketplace results and enterprise subsidiary acquisitions. Free cash flow for the second quarter was $65,600,000 In the quarter, we utilized $38,000,000 in cash to buy back 2,900,000 shares as part of our commitment to driving long term shareholder value. At these levels, we expect to be active in the share repurchases in the back half of this year. Cash and cash equivalents were approximately $635,000,000 at the end of the second quarter.

Speaker 3

Now turning to guidance. For the 2025, we expect to generate revenue in the range of 190,000,000 to $195,000,000 For adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter, we are guiding to a range of 47,000,000 to 51,000,000 which represents an adjusted EBITDA margin in the range of 25% to 26%. Included in this guidance is the absorption of incremental costs related to the acquisitions of both Ascend and Bubtea, as well as incremental spend to support the expansion of the enterprise business. Even as we invest in future growth, we will achieve meaningful year over year margin improvement in 2025, and we are reiterating our long term adjusted EBITDA margin target of 35%. As a result of our strong execution and encouraging early impact from our numerous platform enhancements, we are increasing our full year revenue guide to be in the range of $765,000,000 to $775,000,000 While this guidance does include some minimal top line benefit from the announced enterprise subsidiary acquisitions, the vast majority of the revenue guidance raise is due to the continued strength in our marketplace business.

Speaker 3

We are also increasing our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance to be in the range of $2.00 6,000,000 to $214,000,000 or 27% adjusted EBITDA margin at the midpoint. This represents a more than five point margin expansion versus 2024. We expect full year 2025 non GAAP diluted EPS to be between $1.14 and $1.18 up from our 2024 results. We are building the foundation for accelerated multi year growth, and this is reflected in our increased 2025 guidance ranges. We are on the path to top line growth in 2026, driven by multiple well developed catalysts.

Speaker 3

On stock based compensation, we have been taking meaningful steps to reduce our SBC expense, and these actions will have a lasting benefit on our recorded stock based compensation and GAAP profitability. Stock based comp is expected to be between 60,000,000 and $65,000,000 for the year. In closing, Q2 twenty twenty five was a standout quarter that reflects the strength of our strategy, the power of our platform, and the exceptional execution of our team. We delivered record profitability, exceeded guidance on every major financial metric, and raised our full year outlook, all while navigating an uncertain macro environment. Our disciplined cost management, expanding gross margins, and ability to bend the GSV curve underscore the effectiveness of our strategy and the speed of our execution.

Speaker 3

We are making bold strategic moves to unlock long term growth, accelerating our enterprise transformation with two game changing acquisitions and delivering fully integrated AI enabled customer experiences. As we move into the second half of the year, we are confident in our ability to drive continued operational excellence while investing in durable profitable growth. We remain focused on increasing value for our clients, for our talent, and for our shareholders, and we are just getting started. With that, we will be happy to take your questions.

Operator

And our first question coming from the line of Josh Chan with UBS. Your line is now open.

Speaker 4

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to ask about the acquisitions. Could you talk about kind of these assets in particular, how maybe give an example of how they will work once you integrate into your Upwork platform and, you know, kind of how things will flow through the revenue and and GST in in terms of how you're gonna report it. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Josh. We've always been best in class in offering our enterprise clients talent through the independent contracting model, and we've provided a range of solutions such as employer of record and other contracting types through our partners and extensions or workarounds of our platform. Historically, this partnership approach really limited our ability to serve the full range of opportunities that enterprise customers approached us on. So that includes other engagement types like employer of record, some types of managed services, and staff augmentation. Clients have been asking us to expand into these spaces, because they love our strength in independent contracting.

Speaker 2

They love our digitally native platform, and they wanted to use us for broader parts of their contingent work programs. With these acquisitions, we're really bringing into Upwork a fully comprehensive, digitally native set of solutions that combine our incredible talent pool with Buggee's workforce management system and Ascend's contingent employment solution. And each of those businesses and their products were purpose built for enterprises. So going forward, we are going be able to serve enterprises in all of these different ways across their full contingent programs, meeting them where they are, integrating into their existing efforts, and really not requiring major change management on their sides. We've had the benefit of piloting both BUPTE and ASCEND together along with our solution.

Speaker 2

And that really showed us how effective this combination is going to be and gave us tremendous confidence that this is the right solution that will open up this tremendous $650,000,000,000 enterprise opportunity.

Speaker 3

And, Josh, this is Erica. Maybe I'll just hit the question on GSV and revenue. Like I said, these transactions are immediately GSV and revenue accretive in 2025. They'll have a very small, approximately $5,000,000 or so benefit in the back half of 2025 revenue. And they'll contribute some top line growth as we enter 2026.

Speaker 3

As Shane described, these enterprises have long sales cycles, and we are going after very large multimillion dollar contracts with both our existing enterprise customers and and new enterprise customers. So we expect to see much more meaningful GSV and revenue accretion in late twenty twenty six.

Speaker 4

Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you for the for the color there. And then maybe if I can ask about the macro situation, I guess some of the employment oriented data points have kind of softened in recent months.

Speaker 4

How are you seeing the macro environment impacting your business kind of through Q2? And recognizing that you're taking other steps to kind of offset them, but I'm just curious what kind of macro shape are you embedding into the second half? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I'll comment on the macro, Josh. So, the environment right now continues to be unpredictable. We really haven't seen notable changes from the prior quarter. And so, the slower acquisition environment that we've been experiencing for a while now does weigh on things like our active client metrics, but we're now lapping those trends. We have been executing extremely well, and we're increasingly successful in offsetting these macro pressures through the things we can't control.

Speaker 2

Things like AI enablement of our platform, growth in our AI categories, our enterprise strategy, which we just discussed. So, if you look at our Q2 beat and the increased revenue guide that we just shared, it really reflects our confidence in our own initiatives, despite not anticipating or seeing any changes in the macro now or in the near term. As we said for a while, we do look at a lot of factors here, but we feel that this is a very prudent outlook, and we're excited about what we're delivering.

Speaker 4

Perfect. Thank you for the color, and congrats on the quarter. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Maria Ribbs with Canaccord. Your line is now open.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions and congrats on the acquisitions. Can we maybe dive a little bit deeper sort of on your comment around bending the GSV curve? I guess, what contributed the most to take rate expansion this quarter? So should we think about AI enhancement, maybe monetization products like other sort of new offerings like business plan?

Speaker 5

And sort of now with these two acquisitions that you announced today, maybe talk about the opportunity going forward, especially as you think about the gap between your platform and other platforms or solutions out there on the take rate.

Speaker 3

Okay. Hey, Maria. I'll talk a little bit about take rate and then maybe I'll hand it to Hayden. She can talk a little bit about some of the opportunities that we're seeing, which are really exciting on the GSB front. In terms of take rate expansion in Q2, Q2, we've talked a lot about kind of experimentation that we'd be doing on the platform this year and the amount of time and effort that goes into kind of value based take rate strategies.

Speaker 3

So there are quite a number of things that are contributing to the take rate benefit. It's about 50 basis points that we've seen year over year in Q2. One of which is some of the supply and demand experimentation that we've implemented in the platform. We started in May with kind of a larger range of kind of freelancer fees on freelancer side, looking at adjusting the fees according to the amount of freelancer supply on the platform. We've seen some nice take rate benefits there, along with other kind of year over year growth, 19% growth in Connects, and 13% growth in freelancer plus.

Speaker 3

So, actually quite a number of contributors. And we're seeing actually that this is just the beginning and a lot more benefits to come from some of the experimentation we're doing. You want to talk to

Speaker 2

the opportunity? Sure. Overall, we're seeing a lot of bright spots in terms of our GSV performance here and some of things that are unlocking it. So notably, the three pronged strategy we announced the beginning of the year is absolutely working. We're seeing the AI features that we're building on the platform are driving volume and velocity.

Speaker 2

And that means we've seen this $80,000,000.20 25 GSV uplift just from AI and customer experience improvements alone. And that's going to sustain further in 2026 and beyond. We're also seeing great strength in our AI work categories. So, GSP is up 30% year over year in Q2, which is an acceleration versus Q1. Definitely demand there is extremely strong, and that's becoming more evident.

Speaker 2

Enterprise is obviously going to be a bigger opportunity. And to address what you're saying there, we've really set ourselves up with a game changing offering that lets our sales team go to existing and new accounts and really engage with them on multimillion dollar opportunities. So these are even bigger than what we were able to do before. And that is really going to contribute over time to enterprise performance overall in both growth. And again, these are take rate accretive solutions relative to our marketplace, so it's going to help us there as well.

Speaker 5

Great. That's very helpful. And then can you maybe talk about how you are prioritizing sort of investments in AI enterprise and the monetization against other forms of returning capital to shareholders?

Speaker 3

Yeah, sure, Maria. Look, our ability to expand margins and really invest in organic growth is proven with over 20 percentage points of margin expansion over the past two years. And the growth catalysts that we've been investing in over the last two years are really starting to show some strength and starting to bend the GSP curve as we've described. At the same time, we've also been able to execute on some really smart, inexpensive, high ROI M and A. And that's helping drive the growth objectives that we're starting to see success in.

Speaker 3

First, we've had room and objective and now most recently with both TNSN. And last but not least, we've been able to do this while we're also returning capital to shareholders. So far executing $170,000,000 of share buyback just in the last eighteen months. So you can really expect more of the same from us. We're going be focusing our investment in organic growth with really clear year prospects and really focusing in on using our strong free cash flow balance sheet both to accelerate our growth strategy with M and A and to continue our capital return.

Speaker 5

Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Ranjoovi with Citi. Your line is now open. Ron Jovi, your line is open. Please check your mute button.

Operator

Okay, we'll go to the next person. Ron, please queue up if you have a question. Our next question coming from the line of Rohit Kulkarni with ROTH Capital Partners. Your line is now open.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you for the question. This is Jared Osteen on for Rohit Kulkarni. Great to see Business Plus continue to grow substantially. I was curious if you could talk a little bit more to the evolution of how new customers are using the platform and anything to the behavior you're seeing of more mature cohorts?

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's clear from the growth we're seeing in Business Plus that this product is meeting a really clear need in the market. So, we built this offering really for larger SMBs and teams that have bigger work needs from us. And what we're seeing so far is Business Plus clients convert faster. They spend more than a typical Marketplace client. And they are adopting across the board high value features like access to our expert vetted talent and AI powered talent sourcing and shortlisting.

Speaker 2

So this all contributed to that big GSV growth of 190% quarter over quarter in Business Plus and the 45% growth in clients. And it really is showing that the offering is resonating. I would say the fact that 35% of Business Plus clients are entirely new to Upwork is showing that they want these features, too. We're seeing their adoption very similar to our established customers and really taking up some of these new products and features that are available through Business Plus. And there's not a real difference in terms of how they look new versus existing.

Speaker 2

It's more that Business Plus overall is just such a great segment for us, performing even more strongly than typical Marketplace customers. So we really see this as a material revenue growth driver in 2026 because it's really just kind

Speaker 3

of building up steam now. I would just add, continue to see very strong active client retention overall. This has been a very steady metric for us and our retained clients grew 2% year over year in Q2. So, just another bright spot in terms of drivers behind our GSV proactive growth overall.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Speaker 6

Hi, thank you. This is John for Brent Thill. Maybe some more questions regarding Botkin SN. I guess I'm curious to hear more about the distinction between that and the marketplace and business plus side of the business. I mean, are they very, very distinctly separate?

Speaker 6

What about if you have clients that want to migrate from one to the other? How would that work? If they do sign multimillion dollar contracts, is a recognition of that upfront or is it spread out as they use the labor pool and maybe one more. How is the margin profile compare? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Sure, John. So, the distinction is actually pretty big between the marketplace business and the types of customers and deals that Bubsy and Ascent unlock for us. If we look at our core marketplace business, we have a lot of very small and small business customers who are doing sometimes it's programmatic work for us, with but us, but they don't need the types of features and functionality that very large enterprise customers do. So if you think about, you know, the top few thousand enterprise businesses in the world, they have very complex needs around compliance, around reporting, around auditing, around integrating with existing tools, And that's where Bubtea and Ascend really come in with new capabilities that are tailored for these very big tens of millions of dollars or greater programs. So it's a very different customer set.

Speaker 2

The functionality and the needs are very different. So the question about migrating, certainly, if a customer starts with us in the marketplace, we will have a very clear upgrade path for them to move into our enterprise offerings. But right now, we're really focused on kind of a different set of customers who really are best served and would probably only start with us with all of these robust capabilities that we've added in.

Speaker 3

I'll just add a couple of things and maybe hit a couple of your questions on revenue recognition and margin profile. But first and foremost, just to be super clear, Business Plus is targeted at more of the SMB market. It has a curtailed set of kind of enterprise grade solutions mostly focused on expert vetted talent and other things. And we have seen virtually zero downgrades from our core enterprise business. So, are really different sets of products targeted at different types of businesses.

Speaker 3

In terms of go forward enterprise subsidiary with OT and Nisan integrated, these contracts will be recognized as the work is executed just like our enterprise business is today. So, really no change there. The one thing about the go forward business is the majority of these contracts are likely to be a gross revenue contract, but that'll really largely be a presentation issue. And overall, there's number one, no change at all to our adjusted EBITDA margin target of 35%. And number two, we expect that that enterprise business unit with its huge growth potential will be, you know, meaningfully EBITDA accretive starting in 2027.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Matthew Condon with Citizens Bank. Your line is now open.

Speaker 7

Thank you so much for taking my questions. My first one, I just wanted to ask on the testing of the freelancer fees. Just how widely is this rolled out across the platform today? And how should we think about that being rolled out maybe in the back half of this year and into 2026? Any color there would be helpful.

Speaker 2

Sure. The changes in the testing around the variable fee is still not fully rolled out to all work types or freelancers. And that's because we're still fine tuning exactly what that approach needs to look like. So, I'd say it's still early in that implementation. We have a lot of runway to move forward with that.

Speaker 2

One thing to note about that is it really does drive both GSV and revenue, because these fee changes actually drive more matching. And so we expect that the impact from these things will be positive not just on take rate but also on GSV in 2026.

Speaker 7

Great. That's helpful color. And then I just wanted ask a follow-up just specifically on AI efficiencies internally. You called out some stuff in the press release around customer support, but also just coding. Can you just talk about where we are as far as the efficiencies that you can drive further and cost reductions that you can implement through AI?

Speaker 2

Sure. AI implementation is a huge priority for us, and it's certainly gaining momentum and having an impact both internally and on our margin structure. For us, it's not about replacing people. We're really focused on helping our people be more effective and impactful. So we've been implementing AI workflows across the company.

Speaker 2

In engineering and product development, we're seeing 35% of code shipped is touched by or generated by AI. Customer support is another area we're seeing impact. Our agents are actually able to have faster response times, handle higher volumes of tickets. And in finance and HR, that's another area where we're using AI for things like forecasting and analyzing our internal employee feedback. So, we've done a lot here, but there's definitely more to do.

Speaker 2

And again, does show up in our margin structure, but what we're most excited about is our team is more effective and more productive because of this.

Speaker 7

Thank you.

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