Ben Lilley among new investors in Cavalry Freelancing
Freelancer employment marketplace Cavalry Freelancing has closed an investment round which includes agency entrepreneur Ben Lilley.
In 2011 Lilley sold his agency Smart to McCann, becoming it’s new CEO. McCann went on to create one of the most awarded advertising campaigns of all time, Dumb Ways to Die for Metro trains. Lilley stepped down last year.
Another investor is the founding partner of Ironbridge Capital, Paul Evans. They join ex-global CEO of MullenLowe Profero, Wayne Arnold, who invested in the first funding round.
Cavalry, which was founded in 2018 by former MullenLowe Profero managing director Dave Bentley and Razorfish’s former senior tech lead, Nick Stevens, raised its first round of seed funding in May last year.
Nick Stevens, Cavalry CTO and co-founder, Ben Lilley and Dave Bentley, CEO and co-founder
The platform has flagged continued product development and expansion into small and mid-sized business as the next area of growth.
Dave Bentley, Cavalry CEO, said he believes the business represents the future for the creative services industry.
“The calibre of investment and the talent we’ve been able to attract in our seed round demonstrates a vote of confidence in the growing importance that a platform like Cavalry has in an industry where freelance demand is growing with agencies and brands,” said Bentley.
“Cavalry represents the future of expertise in creative services by making it possible for any company to connect and do business with the world’s best creatives, designers, thinkers and doers.
“Tapping into the freelance market becomes a sustainable and effective option with a system like Cavalry that makes it easy to access a large pool of curated industry experts and build your ideal team of freelancers.”
Lilley said the platform is something he would have happily used during his time at the head of McCann.
“From an investment point of view it’s a no-brainer. Agencies need to be more agile than ever, but historically finding freelancers has been an unreliable and costly headache. Cavalry removes this tension by bringing the creative services freelance community together and making it simple to assemble a team of industry quality experts.”
The Cavalry platform includes a marketplace that recommends and connects companies to freelancers and rosters which help companies build and replenish their freelance team.
This is such BS. It seems that big shot creatives themselves can’t make any money in advertising anymore so they set up platforms like 99designs, Creative Market, Toptal, Getcraft, etc. So they can skim big margins of other creatives who are fighting over crumbs. It drives the price down to absolute amateur/student levels and ruins the industry even more.
People like Lilley should be ashamed of themselves for being instrumental in causing so much damage to good and hardworking creatives that lose their jobs because of this “democratisation” of the craft.
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I can understand your POV, but in all honesty, we’re trying to be the antithesis of what you’re suggesting. Cavalry was always designed to help make it easier to bring companies and freelancers together without creating an environment where there is a race to the bottom in terms of price. In reality we see that companies are generally more interested in finding strong freelancers and are happy to pay market rate. Whats more, we let Freelances set the rate when applying for gigs and to date our rates reflect the industry as a whole. Lastly, our fees are added on top of Freelancer fees so there is no encroachment on their fees. We’re still learning and evolving so if there are other ways we can create a healthy environment, we’re all ears.
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Have you used the platform? It’s fairly impressive and not what you describe at all.
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Nope. Find a finders fee and many other social communities do this for me for free, while tapping into the power of connection and referral. #fail
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