Rev raises $4.5M for freelance marketplace from founders of similar service

Rev.com, a online marketplace to find freelancer work, launched today with $4.5 million in a 2012 funding round from oDesk board member Venky Ganesan and others.

The company was founded by early employees at oDesk, a similar workforce of contractors, though Rev.com specifically focuses on the freelance marketplace. Individuals and companies can come to receive two of the service offered on today’s launch: audio transcription and translation. The translation services further break out into different offerings including business documents and immigration documents.

You can buy Rev’s transcription services for $1 a minute, translation of business docs for 12 cents a word and immigration documents for $33 a page.

Unlike Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, the founders behind Rev.com believe strongly in the ability to work from home.

“We believe that the Internet should give most people the option to work from home,” the company said in an email to VentureBeat. “We think that work-from-home is at one-hundreth of its potential, like e-Commerce in 1999. We saw the transition to work-from-home happening, but we didn’t think it was happening fast enough.”

Of course, these freelancers aren’t the same employees Mayer is managing, but it does represent another solution to help both remote employees work more efficiently, and companies to trust those workers.

Rev.com was founded in 2010 and currently employs 14 people. It is headquartered in San Francisco. Globespan Capital; Craig Sherman, the former chief operating officer of Ancestry.com; and Austin Ligon, the founder of Carmax, also invested in the round.

Rev team photo via Rev