Before it was a marketplace worth hundreds of millions in annual business, Malt was a drinks evening for freelancers. The company was called Hopwork then. It held its apéros freelance, small meetups for people who worked alone, and it said openly that it was copying Airbnb: build a community first and the transactions would follow.
Vincent Huguet was the chief executive. With Hugo Lassiège and Jean-Baptiste Lemée he started Hopwork in 2013. Huguet had already co-founded Dromadaire, an online greeting-card company, and Ooprint, a printing business, so he knew what it meant to build a web business from nothing. This time the product was people.
Rivals such as Crème de la Crème and Comet crowded in, and Germany, its second market, proved slow and complex.
The early years were a bet on trust. A freelancer needs a reason to believe that a platform will bring work. A client needs a reason to believe that a stranger on a screen is competent. The founders chose rules that irritated some freelancers and reassured buyers: no one could set a day rate below 125 euros, to avoid a race to the bottom. They raised five million euros in December 2016, partnered with Bpifrance in September 2017 and renamed the company Malt that November.
The turn was the large company. Huguet told Maddyness in March 2025 that a decade earlier big firms did not really know what a freelancer was. Malt helped them learn. By February 2019 it said it had 100,000 freelancers and 15,000 corporate clients, and raised 25 million euros. In June 2021 it raised 80 million from Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, Eurazeo and its early backers ISAI and Serena. By January 2022 it claimed 300,000 freelancers, and a month later it joined the Next40.
The price was competition and a change of cast. Alexandre Fretti, who had run the French business beside Huguet since 2020, left in 2024. Rivals such as Crème de la Crème and Comet crowded in, and Germany, its second market, proved slow and complex. Huguet said the company needed no new money unless it entered the United States, and that an IPO was not on his agenda.
The numbers he gave for 2024 were an 800 million euro business volume, up 30 percent, and a promise of group-level profit in 2025. Malt does not publish revenue, only that volume, and takes about ten percent as commission.
The lesson is old and easily forgotten. Malt did not start with a marketplace. It started with a room of people who worked alone and wanted to meet. The transactions came afterwards, because the community was already there.