Freelancer (FLN: ASX), the Australia-based online freelance platform, last week reported net revenue for the six months ending 30 June 2015 of AUD 16.8 million (USD 12.3 million), an increase of 40.8% compared with AUD 11.9 million (USD 8.7 million) during the same period last year. 

Matt Barrie, Chairman and CEO of Freelancer, commented: “In 1H15 our focus was continued growth in project and contest volume, international growth in countries and languages, and growth in mobile usage. We built even better tools to communicate and collaborate, improved our internal algorithms including matchmaking…”

“We launched local jobs in 100 new categories of location specific work, increasing our total addressable market from circa AUD 122 billion (USD 89 billion) to several hundred billion per annum. We continued to execute on our bolt-on acquisition strategy, acquiring two small marketplaces.”

The company’s results were boosted by a number of acquisitions but the company provided no indication of its organic growth.

“We acquired Escrow.com, the leading provider of secure online payments on the internet. This business had 2014 gross payment volume of USD 265 million. 2014 net revenue of USD 5 million, and 2014 USD 1.2 million in EBITDA – with over USD 2.2 billion in transactions to day,” Mr Barrie added.

In addition to Escrow.com, Freelancer acquired the assets of defunct Israeli freelance platform Donanza and acquired Spanish freelance platform Projectlinkr.com, both in March 2015.

The company’s financial results were also positively impacted by acquisitions made during the first half of 2014; namely internet marketing forum and marketplace Warrior Forum, Polish freelance platform Zlecenia.przez.net (Work Through the Net), and Ukraine-based virtual content marketplace Fantero.com.  

In the second half of 2014 Freelancer acquired the assets of Sydstart, a Sydney-based technology start-up conference and community.

Looking forward, Mr Barrie added: “We are continuing to focus on the product, user experience, scalability, and expanding the features of the marketplace offering. We will also continue to focus on expanding the functionality and penetration of our platform across mobile devices, and will continue to expand across regional and multilingual markets, and further across job categories.”

“Escrow.com is a major strategic acquisition for us. All major global marketplaces have captive payment systems Escrow.com is the world’s number one company for secure online payments, with exceptional network effects with the Freelancer group. It is an acquisition that materially enhances our ability to capture more of the value chain and provide value-added services,” he concluded.

Following the release of the company’s financial results, Freelancer’s share price on Friday closed up 12.9% at AUD 1.49 (USD 1.09), an increase of approximately 128% compared with a year ago. Based on its closing share price, the company has a market value of AUD 663.6 million (USD 483.9 million).