Earnings Labs

Upwork Inc. (UPWK)

Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Mon, Feb 9, 2026

$10.43

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Upwork Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants on a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Gary Fuges, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Gary Fuges

Analyst

Thank you and welcome to Upwork's discussion of its fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. Joining me today are Hayden Brown, Upwork's President and Chief Executive Officer; and Erica Gessert, 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 securities laws. 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 and 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 the risks and other important factors discussed in today's earnings press release. Additional information will also be available on our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to certain non-GAAP financial measures. 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. 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. Finally, unless otherwise noted, reported figures are rounded, comparisons to the fourth quarter of 2025 are to the fourth quarter of 2024 and comparisons of the full year 2025 are to the full year 2024. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Hayden.

Hayden Brown

Analyst

Good afternoon, and welcome to Upwork's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. In 2025, we completed a 3-year journey to fundamentally transform the business and position Upwork to extend our leadership in the AI era. We've reinvented our product, customer experience and operations to enable Upwork to become the human plus AI solution for the market. Today, we're seeing the early benefits of the new Upwork in our full year 2025 financial performance, which included over $4 billion in GSV, $788 million in revenue and $226 million in adjusted EBITDA. Both revenue and adjusted EBITDA were at record levels with revenue growth of 2.4% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 29%, and we finished the year with a strong Q4 that included year-over-year growth of 3% in GSV, 4% in revenue and a 27% adjusted EBITDA margin. We're entering the year well positioned to accelerate growth and generate strong margins in 2026 and beyond by capitalizing on the $1.3 trillion market opportunity in front of us. In this new era of work reshaped by AI, Upwork is positioned to lead the shift towards flexible skills-based talent. I'll unpack our fourth quarter operating achievements across the 3 growth pillars we shared at our November Investor Day, AI, SMB and Enterprise and share our 2026 goals for each. Erica will discuss our Q4 and full year 2025 financial performance and 2026 guidance, and then we'll take your questions. There's no doubt that AI is reshaping how work gets done. From what we see every day on our platform, AI and humans do their best work together. Our research published in November shows that human plus agent collaboration increases job completion rates by up to 70% compared to agents working alone and we're not an outlier. Third-party reports from Anthropic, LinkedIn and…

Erica Gessert

Analyst

Thanks, Hayden. Before reviewing our Q4 and full year 2025 results, I would like to take a minute to say how proud I am to be a part of the fantastic Upwork team. Our teams executed relentlessly over the past 3 years, working with discipline and speed to transform Upwork, preparing us to lead in the future of work. We grew GSV to over $4 billion in 2025 with fourth quarter GSV accelerating to 3% growth year-over-year at over $1 billion. We continue to evolve the Upwork and Lifted platforms to serve the highest value customers and use cases which is showing up in key leading indicators on our platform. In addition to the AI and Business Plus growth metrics Hayden shared, average GSV per active client increased throughout the year, growing 7% year-over-year in Q4 to a record level of over $5,100. And overall spend per contract increased 10% year-over-year, resulting in the highest ever average spend per contract over any 12-month period at Upwork. While Marketplace GSV growth was relatively flat in the fourth quarter over last year. This was driven primarily by fewer low-value, high-volume contracts. Given the positive fundamentals around larger clients, we expect positive GSV and revenue growth in each quarter of 2026. We ended the quarter with 785,000 active clients. GSV per new client increased 5% year-over-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter, representing our sixth consecutive quarter of annual growth for this key value signal. Our churn rate declined over the course of 2025 with fourth quarter churn reaching its lowest level in over 8 quarters. Churn in Q4 was over 130 basis points lower than the churn rate in Q4 2024. These improving churn rates as well as growing yields in our acquisition marketing mean that we expect to resume sequential active client growth in…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst

Maybe one, just putting a finer point on the way you're framing 2026. When you think about the investments you're making exiting 2025 and moving it to the front half of 26, whether it be AI features on the platform or Business Plus expansion or even Lifted. How should we think about those investments scaling as you move deeper into 2026. But more importantly, how should we think about some of the contributions to GSV and revenue growth building and momentum as you get deeper into 2026 and the exit velocity of 2026.

Erica Gessert

Analyst

Thanks, Eric. This is Erica. We've always anticipated when we guided to the 4% to 6% GSV growth and 6% to 8% revenue growth at our Investor Day. We always anticipated a ramp throughout the year in kind of both GSV and revenue. As we mentioned on the call, Lifted -- the investment side of Lifted, we're engaging in right now really moving as quickly as possible with our integration. That includes kind of initial investments in kind of sales and marketing there as well as finalizing our national entity structure. We expect to onboard and ramp new customers and existing customers on to Lifted platform in the back half of the year. And so we're going to see some acceleration there on the Enterprise side. Similarly, on the Marketplace side, we have very strong kind of growth trajectory of our growth levers. The AI category growing over 50% year-over-year. Business Plus growing 24%. And actually, its ramp into Q1 is even stronger than we expected when we planned for the year. So we feel very good about the growth trajectory of these growth levers and expect them to ramp throughout the year and exit at our high point for growth rates on both Lifted and the Marketplace.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citi.

Ronald Josey

Analyst · Citi.

I wanted to ask a little bit about the search and recommendation functionality that Hayden, I think, you talked about on -- from an AI perspective. Just wanted to hear about the early benefits here and help us understand how the search and recommendation functionalities can improve overall visibility? And then on, Erica, back to sort of Eric's question on visibility on the margin side. Talk to us about the sales and marketing initiatives that you're running from a Business Plus perspective and the results you've seen thus far?

Hayden Brown

Analyst · Citi.

On the AI and search side, we've made a few types of investments here that already started having impact for us last year, and we'll continue to ramp this year, both in terms of features that are live and new features we'll be shipping. To give you a little bit of color on that, we launched Uma Recruiter as one example, which is a key feature currently in the Business Plus plan. That's really accelerating time to hire by getting clients to a short list of really high fit candidates very quickly. We've also been launching some features around things like conversational search and messaging where we can get a much richer idea of a client's goals and needs and then go into our tremendous talent pool and target the right prospects for that based on that more enriched search experience. So some of those things are already live and having impact, and we'll continue to ramp across our customer base this year. And then, of course, we're also doing more this year to take the investments in the Uma platform and really make some changes to the user experience, both on the side of kind of pre-hire, so the search and match side as well as the collaboration and project management area. Those are places where we're investing this year. We're shipping new experiences that really are transformative and are much more AI-powered with Uma at the center of those experiences. And what we're seeing in early testing is they really are having a positive impact to customers as they go through our funnel and are able to offload more of the work to Uma and move more quickly towards their goals. So that work is ongoing and is definitely going to propel our results this year.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · Citi.

And Ron, to your question on marketing and specifically on Business Plus, but we did start to have some Business Plus dedicated campaigns launching in Q4 and have continued some of those into Q1. The great thing about Business Plus is these customers spend 2.5x the platform average in GSV and new customers who onboard onto Business Plus have a higher spend profile than the average. And so these are very good investments for us. And one of the reasons we're stepping -- kind of marketing up a little bit around the Marketplace side in Q1 is because we are seeing some very nice yields in terms of the spend that we've been doing. And so the great thing about kind of how we've been managing our cost base is, we will have capacity this year to spend a little bit more on the sales and marketing side, because we have other longer-term kind of cost optimization projects coming through that we expect to benefit the back half of the year. That includes some back-end automation we've been working on for a couple of years now as well as a location strategy to hire and kind of lower cost locations. So all those things will benefit us in the back half, enable us to kind of continue to grow our margins and invest in marketing.

Operator

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies.

Sang-Jin Byun

Analyst · Jefferies.

This is John Byun on for Brent Thill. Maybe 2 questions. One, in terms of the Q1 guide on maybe revenue and GSV, are there any special seasonal factors there, given I think people expect a little more in Q1, excluding the ramp in Lifted, especially, I guess, in the Marketplace segment. And then second on, I think, sorry about that, second, on the top of funnel, if you could talk about any impact from SEO versus GEO and performance marketing, that would be great.

Hayden Brown

Analyst · Jefferies.

John, I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? We were having some technical difficulties on our end.

Sang-Jin Byun

Analyst · Jefferies.

Okay. Yes, I did hear the echo. Yes. The first question was on the Q1 guide for GSV and revenue. I mean wondering if there are any special seasonal factors given, I think, people expect a little more. I mean I know you're ramping Lifted more in the second half, but I don't know if there's any other factors in the Marketplace segment. And then at the top of the funnel, I don't know if you've seen any impact still in SEO versus GEO in the different performance marketing channels. Thank you.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · Jefferies.

For the first question on the Q1 guide, I apologize, we're having a little bit of audio difficulty here on our end, but hopefully, everyone can hear me. On the Q1 guide, look, Q1 is manifesting as we expected when we guided at our Investor Day in November, this was always going to be a little bit of a bridge quarter for us, first and foremost, as you referenced on the Enterprise side with the investments upfront in Lifted and really the acceleration of revenue in GSV coming when we start to transfer people onto the platform. On the Marketplace side, we have been focusing on growing these larger customers with longer-term relationships. And that's been extremely successful for us. It's showing up across our platform and are lowering churn rates and other things like that. But there is some ramp to the spend with these customers. And so if there's been kind of an any kind of smaller impacts on the margins to volumes. It's really been at the very lowest end smallest contract types kind of sub-$100 contracts. Every leading indicator on our platform for future growth, including GSV per active, up 7% year-over-year, spend per contract of 10% year-over-year and importantly, spend per new customer continues to grow, which is a very important value signal for us. So we feel really good about the underlying growth trajectory of our business and are confident in our guide for the year. On the top of funnel question on SEO and GEO. I think, we actually have seen some very, very good initial yields on the GEO side, but it's super early days. These are very, very new channels for everyone. And I also think there's some interplay still between SEO and GEO. So we feel really confident and positive about what we're seeing from a signal point of view on that side of the house, but it's also very early days.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Maria Ripps with Canaccord.

Maria Ripps

Analyst · Canaccord.

First, can you maybe expand a little more on active client trends in Q4? And I guess, what are some of the dynamics that you are seeing that should drive expected client growth setting this quarter? I think you mentioned marketing campaign, but is there anything else to highlight?

Erica Gessert

Analyst · Canaccord.

Yes. So obviously, we talked on the call, our churn rate has been coming down kind of sequentially throughout 2025, and down 130 bps throughout the year, year-over-year in Q4. So the ongoing benefits to churn rate, this is -- if you -- the active client number is a trailing 12-month number. So those are going to continue to compound and benefit us as we go into 2026. So that is one of the dynamics helping us as well as the fact that we are seeing some good top-of-funnel yields as we go into Q1. And so we're feeling pleased with also the kind of top-of-funnel acquisition, which is going to benefit us and help to resume active client growth.

Maria Ripps

Analyst · Canaccord.

Got it. That's helpful. And then so given expanding demand for AI work, did you feel like you have sufficient AI talent on the platform? I guess, is that a bottleneck in any sense? And are you doing anything different to maybe attract AI platform -- to the platform?

Hayden Brown

Analyst · Canaccord.

Sure, Maria. We are really pleased with the category growth that we've already seen, up more than 50% year-over-year. This is our fastest-growing category and subcategories within the AI group are really on fire, which is exciting for us. We expect this to continue to be a trend throughout this year and into the future years. We are not seeing strong indications on the platform. However, we're always looking at making sure we have exactly the right talent to do this work, augmenting the pool we have of 250,000 AI experts already working with our clients in the last year alone. And that's where we're doing things like the partnership with OpenAI where we're helping them on the side of sort of certifying 10 million talent that they've committed to with their OpenAI for jobs initiative, and we are definitely exited to see a place where those can come and find work. So we're not seeing a bottleneck here. We're excited about the growth. We think it's extremely durable based on what we're seeing in the ecosystem and our investing in 2025 and 2026 rather.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Condon with Citizens.

Matthew Condon

Analyst · Citizens.

My first one is just -- it's great to see the 2 new clients in the Enterprise side of the business. But is there any color you can give on just existing clients and the demand that you're seeing from them, whether it be test budgets or any other signals that would give us confidence as we move into the back half of the year? And then my second one is just on the variable freelancer fee. Just wanted to see how that's progressing as you roll that out more broadly across the Marketplace.

Hayden Brown

Analyst · Citizens.

Sure, Matt. On the listed side, we are very pleased that we're tracking to plan with this work. And yes, we've seen both the new client interest, including the 2 clients you referenced, which given the sales cycle in Enterprise is so long, we are very pleased to already have those clients coming on board with us. But you're right, we're also in conversations with our existing customers who are moving us in for RFPs and contracts that we would not have been in contention with before. And so our funnel is quite healthy, and that's a mix of both new demand and folks that are really new to our story, but also existing customers who now are considering us for work that was previously really not in the cards for us. So all the signs there are extremely promising in terms of the green shoots, and we see a really clear path to accelerating this business over the course of the year.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · Citizens.

Yes. And then just on the variable freelancer fee, Matt, we are really excited about the strategy. We had some real success with the very early testing that we did in 2025. We are going to be rolling out the variable freelancer fee to more categories starting in Q1 and kind of doing more of a gradual rollout throughout the year. And so that's another reason that we have a lot of confidence in the ramp for the year from a revenue point of view and GSV because we are kind of rolling this out gradually and we'll continue to test. But this has been a super successful strategy for us and actually really speaks to the strength of our data science bench here, which has been really creative and come up with something that is using the supply and demand dynamics on the platform to drive both GSV and revenue.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham.

Bernard McTernan

Analyst · Needham.

Great, appreciate it. Maybe just to start on Business Plus it was -- the large number, 38% of clients are actually being new to Upwork. I was just surprised it seems like it's a pretty strong acquisition to why I thought it might be more of an existing selling. So maybe you can just talk to the go-to-market there and what you're seeing that's successful. And then on the -- just a clarification on the fourth quarter, given the Marketplace take rate of 19%, I think it implies the Enterprise GSV was up a lot year-over-year. So basically, should we expect a step down in 1Q before ramp back up throughout the year? Or just how to think about the shape of the GSV trends on Enterprise.

Hayden Brown

Analyst · Needham.

On the side of Business Plus, you're right, this has actually proven to be an extremely effective client acquisition strategy. And I think we're still very early in kind of fully deploying the opportunity around that. And we did this first targeted SMB marketing campaign in Q4. We saw some really positive results from that. We are seeing great acceleration both in terms of client volumes, 49% client growth quarter-on-quarter and the spend, which is really important because this is a key part of our strategy for moving Upmarket to larger small businesses. Those that maybe have 50-plus employees, have much more sustaining spend, are looking to get more complex work done. This is really the sweet spot for that product. And we're already ahead of plan as we enter Q1 in terms of the contribution of Business Plus to GSV against the target we have exiting the year coming from Business Plus. So all signs are really showing that this is something that's appealing to both new and existing customers. And I think there's a lot of run room for us to continue to both expand the value proposition, but also execute the marketing and other things behind that growth that's going to be durable this year and beyond.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · Needham.

Yes. And on the GSV trends on Enterprise, there obviously is some contribution from the acquisitions in terms of the year-over-year growth. But overall kind of Enterprise revenue, we are in sort of a holding pattern right now in terms of the revenue that we're recognizing from our legacy business. As -- just to remind everyone, we stopped selling new Enterprise plans. And actually, we stopped both the land and expand motion on legacy Enterprise at the beginning of 2025. And so to the extent there is some minor churn at the low end on Enterprise right now. We don't have new customers coming on the platform right now to replace it. So in Q1, we do expect there to be some kind of slight decline in overall Enterprise revenue sequentially, but that's all in anticipation of the build on Lifted and really ramping up very quickly once we put the new platform -- light up the new platform.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Rohit Kulkarni with ROTH Capital Partners.

Rohit Kulkarni

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners.

Does data point on AI clients spending 3x your average spend per client. Can you comment on what's specifically driving that higher spend? Is it higher rates, longer duration, more scope of projects, more projects at the same time? And then just to clarify on this -- when we reconcile your first quarter and full year guide, it implies a path where revenue growth exits this year and possibly mid-teens from where you are right now. So pretty significant back-end loaded acceleration. Can you talk about whether that's a fair way to think about it? And apart from Enterprise, is there something that gives you confidence to that stronger second half growth?

Erica Gessert

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners.

Yes, sure. In terms of the AI category, Rohit, so several of the factors you mentioned are true about the spend on the AI category. First and foremost, average kind of hourly weight or hourly rate or wage in the AI category is about 40% higher than kind of average kind of tech wages on the platform. So it is significantly higher rate. There is also just higher volume of work. So if you think about some of the spend and actually where we're seeing very fast growth, it is in kind of AI infrastructure work, also generative AI, kind of prompt engineering type work and some of these are quite big or long-term projects. So yes. So it's -- overall, there's a good reason to see -- to believe that this is going to continue to grow, and we really see no end in sight to the growth in that category. In terms of sorry, what was -- I think the other question was the exit rate for revenue growth. Yes. Enterprise is a big factor here because the 25% year-over-year GSV growth that we're targeting for Enterprise that's really all in the back half of the year. So that is ramping quickly in the back half of the year, like we said, once that platform lights up. But we also have a lot of confidence, and we do expect that Marketplace GSV and revenue will continue to ramp from a growth rate point of view throughout the rest of this year. And the reason for that is that we are -- all of these kind of growth drivers in the platform are scaling up. Business Plus continues to grow and scale every single quarter. The AI category growing 50% year-over-year. We have visibility into that and expect that to at least continue the current growth rates throughout 2026. And then like I said, things like the variable freelancer fee, which will also be ramping. All of these are drivers to enable the growth of GSV and revenue throughout the year.

Rohit Kulkarni

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners.

Okay. And if I could ask a question like a big picture question to Hayden on agents, fascinating stuff in the prepared remarks, when you say human agent collaboration, can you elaborate what does the workflow actually look like in practice as in an Upwork, where do you see humans add value? And where do you see agents fully automate tasks? And how does kind of Upwork actually end up benefiting on either of those 2 sides?

Hayden Brown

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners.

So there's, I'd say, like raging debate about is it AI or humans or is it AI and human. And we are looking at the data on our platform in this every single day, and it is very clear that the solutions that are winning in the market today bring together the best of what agents can do with human judgment, with human as an overlay and a supplement to what the AI agents are capable of, even the most powerful ones. We launched this Benchmark last year, called the HAPI Benchmark, which really is benchmarking humans and agents together. And that really shows that when you bring a human into the mix, agents are able to complete work with a 70% or more success rate than when they're just operating alone. So there's a big step up when you bring humans into the equation. So all of that is a backdrop for our strategy, which is really about bringing our incredible asset in terms of a talent network that is skilled, that is capable, that is AI equipped, alongside agents, whether they are our own agents like Uma, but also the huge and growing ecosystem of third-party agents. So that those humans and agents can collaborate seamlessly to deliver outcomes for our clients. And you're right, Rohit. This is not a user experience that exists anywhere else, and we are really building it from the ground up here at Upwork. We have a product in testing today where clients can submit jobs or submit work they're trying to get done and human and agent pairs collaborate on delivering those results. That's the experience that we are using as kind of the initial framing for what we'll be rolling out over the course of this year, where we bring humans and agents together as collaborative workers inside of our ecosystem, delivering work for customers. But our view is that this is -- we are in the early innings of a huge opportunity. I think it's roughly $130 billion of agentic spend by 2028. And we believe we can participate in a meaningful part of that by enabling third-party agents and our talent to collaborate together to deliver incredible work outcomes right here on our platform.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Josh Chan with UBS.

Joshua Chan

Analyst · UBS.

Just 2 questions from me. I guess the first question is on EBITDA. I was wondering if you could bridge us from the $59 million to almost $60 million of EBITDA you did in Q3 to the $53 million in Q4 and then and then the Q1 guide. I know that revenue is a little bit lower, but just curious to hear what moving pieces are leading to that EBITDA cadence over the last couple of quarters? And then, I guess, secondly, on Enterprise, what are some of the milestones that you are looking for to achieve in order to hit your kind of 2026 aspirations? I know you mentioned winning 2 clients. So how many clients do you need to win by midyear to get there? Just something to help us understand the pace of what we should be hoping for would be helpful on that side.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · UBS.

Yes, Josh, on the EBITDA bridge, in Q4 is when we really -- Q3 we closed the Ascen deal and so had only about, I think, half a quarter of their cost base in our results. So we -- the full quarter of the 2 cost bases, but more importantly, we incurred in Q4, we started to incur a number of kind of integration costs that are temporary in nature to -- in order to kind of enable that business largely on the kind of platform enablement side. Similarly, in Q1, I think, we're projecting about $6 million of investment in Q1, much of which is temporary in nature as we kind of invest in the final international entity structure and other things for the Lifted platform. Also in Q4, we -- it tends to be a slightly lighter adjusted EBITDA quarter, and that's largely because of kind of bonus accruals and other things that happened in that quarter.

Hayden Brown

Analyst · UBS.

On the side of the Enterprise milestones, Josh, we feel great about where the pipeline is right now in order to achieve those growth goals that we have for later in the year. Just to give you the sense, we're going after a target set of about 3,000 Enterprise customers who all spend each one $50 million or more on contingent labor. And so a shift in our strategy now that Lifted is coming into fruition really lets us go after much bigger customers with much bigger contracts than what we are eligible for in the past. And so to hit our growth goal, we don't need hundreds of customers to onboard. We need a small number of high-quality clients who are ramping their programs with us and not we're very focused on, and we see the signs of that happening. So key milestones as we look out across the year, but first of all, we'll be launching and migrating clients onto the Lifted platform once our integration work is complete, and we're targeting the middle of the year for that. And then, of course, on the back of those migrations and turning on both new and existing customers with that functionality, we will see those step ups in GSV revenue that we're expecting in Q3 and Q4.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets.

Bradley Erickson

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

Two for me. One, you shared -- you talked a lot today about all the way AI is driving growth, GSV active customers, et cetera. So when we kind of put that in the context of GSV up 3% in Q4, what are the parts of the Marketplace business that are still kind of seeing headwinds? And any help you can give us there about kind of the persistence of that? And then I have a follow-up.

Hayden Brown

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

Sure. We are really excited about the momentum we see in the AI categories. And I would say we continue to see on the flip side, a minor impact from categories like writing and translation, which for many quarters and now even years have been declining due to automation broadly and AI more recently. So that's one small factor, but I'd actually say the bigger factor behind some of our more modest growth rates in the immediate term, it's really just like -- it's a transition quarter for us. We've really been launching our Enterprise sales strategy. That's ramping the SMB strategy around Business Plus, that's ramping. Those things are really coming into effect over the course of this year. And at the same time, I'd say on the margin, this is a labor market that's not great and certainly hasn't improved. We saw in December, the lowest BLS data on job openings since September of 2020. And I think that's just indicative of the slowness in the market overall, which, of course, tracks through to our platform to an extent, even though we're growing faster than competitors. Even though we're growing when folks staffing firms are reporting negative growth numbers still. So I think the comparison is we're taking share and we're positioned well with our growth strategy. A lot of these tailwinds are not very durable like AI, and we're very focused on that that's are working.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

I would just add, Brad, real quick to this, which is that if we're seeing headwinds, it's not so much on a category level, aside from writing and translation, which has been consistent in our platform for a while. But we are -- we see some kind of a little bit of negative growth on these very, very small, very transactional projects, kind of sub-$300 or more and so -- or less. And so honestly, that just reinforces the power of our strategy to focus on these longer-term relationships, which are durable they ramp over time, they improve our churn rates, and we maintain these relationships for a long time. So I think this is going to be the winning strategy. It's really been working for us. And you can see it in the leading indicators in our base with GSV per client, GSV per contract, you use for a new customer, all of these things going up into the right. So we feel good about it.

Bradley Erickson

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

Yes. That's great. That makes a lot of sense. And then second, just I think you mentioned M&A in your prepared remarks. Just curious kind of what's interesting there between maybe product type of acquisitions or maybe better access to certain channels or maybe something else strategic? Just help us kind of what do you guys spitball as the management team around potential M&A.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

So our guidance and our outlook for this year is definitely not predicated on any additional M&A. We are going to achieve our plans just based on or organic levers that are written for us. However, we have done some fantastic and very beneficial M&A over the last 2.5 years. That includes AI-related acquisitions and Enterprise-related acquisitions. And so we will continue to run a playbook that's working for us. And if we see targets out there that are really lined up against our AI, our SMB or Enterprise strategies, those are the places where we would get more interested.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Marvin Fong with BTIG.

Marvin Fong

Analyst · BTIG.

Maybe to start on the 2 new Lifted customers, it's a great sign of validation of the strategy, just very early days, I understand. But would love to hear anything you could say about these 2 clients, I mean, to the extent you're able to speak to how much they spend on contingent labor or just how many employees they have in general? Or even if you can give us that, just anything on how that sales process evolved? Did the deal close as you'd expected on the time line you expect? And then I have a follow-up.

Hayden Brown

Analyst · BTIG.

Sure. So we can't disclose too many specifics on these customers, but I can tell you they're really in the sweet spot of that ideal customer profile we have with tens of millions of dollars of contingent work spend with programmatic work happening through this part of their business, the contingent work program. And I'd say they, like many of the other customers that are in our funnel, they have really lit up when we pitch them on this Lifted proposition and the fact that we could provide a differentiated solution that gives them compliant contracting across all 5 different types of contingent work, through a single platform with the highest quality talent that's out there. So they really were, I think, indicative of the product market fit that we've been building towards with the Lifted strategy. And we have many more customers like them in our funnel, which -- we're pleased to be nurturing over the year. We know this long sales cycle. Some of these buyers only make a decision once annually around going to the vendor in the space. So we're nurturing those relationships. It's working, and we're very excited what that's going to do in the back half of the year.

Marvin Fong

Analyst · BTIG.

Great. And my follow-up, just on the Q1 guidance, just trying to square all the points being made. I think you said clients would be up sequentially yet the revenue guide is down sequentially. Is there something going on with the GSV per client? Or I know you also said Enterprise revenue would be down sequentially. Any more color on the moving parts would be great.

Erica Gessert

Analyst · BTIG.

Yes. So Enterprise revenue, we do expect to be down sequentially. And again, this is really as we kind of invest for the future and make the Lifted platform kind of transaction ready. Overall, our -- I think we're very comfortable with the guide for Q1. And the reality is that when customers join us on the platform, right, as new customers come on, their spend ramps over time. So we are -- we do expect that our kind of new customer count will resume growth sequentially in Q1. But it takes time for those customers to kind of dip their toes in the water and then ramp with us. So we don't get as big of an impact in Q1 from kind of increasing new customer counts.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm showing no further questions in the queue. That does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.