New startup brings freelance software talent to businesses

Global Business

New startup brings freelance software talent to businesses

Innovative startups are disrupting industries. One such company is Gigster. It’s a new platform that gathers freelance talent to solve software challenges for companies.

CGTN’s Mark Niu has more on this job market shake-up in the so-called gig economy.

Justine Li is a Gigster. In the past year, she’s managed about 40 freelance projects through the site Gigster and now pulls in a bigger salary than her previous full-time jobs at big name companies like Microsoft and HP.

She can also choose what projects interest her – like the one she’s doing for her dad, creating a math app that serves children from low-income families.

Since launching a year and a half ago, Gigster has quickly grown to 35 people. But its network of freelancers, primarily developers, has grown by 30 times in the past year to more than a thousand people.

Gigster has already raised more than $12 million from investors who see it as the next big thing due to its use of data and automation to assemble the best freelance team for a project.

Co-founder Debo Olaosebikan left a Cornell PHD program where he was building an electric silicon laser, to start Gigster. Born in Nigeria, he was also on the radio there as the rapper Levelz.

Olasebikan said about 5 percent of Gigster’s developers are from Africa and they make the same money as ones in say, San Francisco.

The average full-time developer can pull in anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 a year. As for clients, Gigster’s automated system can quickly calculate a guaranteed price for each project and is continuously striving to solve an industry problem– predicting how long a job will take to complete.