PeoplePerHour

PeoplePerHour, legally People Per Hour Limited, is a UK-based company whose function is as an online platform giving businesses access to freelance workers.
History.
Founded in 2007 by Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris, the company has offices in London and Athens.  Businesses opting to use the website are often start-ups or SMEs looking to grow flexibly by hiring freelancers to handle projects rather than hiring in-house or via agencies. Jobs start from little as an hour (“Offers”) and can be ramped up as needed to build whole teams online, meaning the model is scalable all the way up to global enterprises. They operate as part of what has become part of the “talent cloud” with thousands of freelancers, offerings a range of skills on a flexible and efficient basis.
As the leading marketplace for freelance talent in the UK, PeoplePerHour hold a powerful insight into the self-employed segment of the labour market and have created and collaborated on numerous research projects on SMEs, freelancing and the gig economy and provide resources for new and growing businesses and those looking to pursue a freelance career.
There is some debate as to whether the emergence of this type of freelance marketplace is part of a longer-term structural change in the way that companies across the world manage their human resources.
Reception.
In August 2012, PeoplePerHour was named by the science and technology magazine, Wired UK as one of "Europe's 100 Hottest Startups of 2012".
In 2012 its 50-person engineering department relocated to Athens.
One of the major investors in PeoplePerHour's is Index Ventures, which gave the company £2M (3.2M dollars) in 2012. Mike Volpi has named PeoplePerHour among the three "most underrated companies" in the Index's portfolio. In its previous seed round, the company had raised approximately £425k.