Braintrust, a global network of highly-skilled technical and design talent, today launched out of stealth to help enterprises continue to innovate amid rapidly-changing economic and labor environments. In its year of existence, Braintrust has earned the trust of dozens of Fortune 500 customers including Nestle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and most recently from the space agency, NASA.

Braintrust, which operates 100% remotely, exists to help employers access highly skilled technical talent, which have traditionally been difficult to hire and retain. The company's expertise in managing remote workforces and distributed teams, combined with its network of top tech talent from around the globe, are valuable resources for companies in need of immediate support.

The company has also closed a $6 million seed round featuring participation from True Ventures, Homebrew Ventures, Uprising Ventures, Galaxy Digital, IDEO CoLab, Kindred Ventures, Vy Capital, and a host of angel investors including Scott Belsky (CPO at Adobe), James Everingham (CTO of Instagram) and Stacy Brown Philpot (CEO of TaskRabbit.)

"We created this project to help companies build more efficient, productive, and resilient workforce solutions," said Adam Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Freelance Labs, the launch partner of Braintrust. "In the current environment of massive economic uncertainty, it is our responsibility to share our expertise in managing a distributed workforce, and help businesses supplement their existing teams and continue to innovate in order to get our economy back on track."

Companies have been turning to Braintrust to build distributed teams before it became a public health necessity. Increasing numbers of highly-skilled technical workers are building lifetime careers as freelancers, and enterprises desperately need this elite talent to keep up with the pace of innovation. Braintrust's highly vetted talent pool includes people that have spent years at top companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google and even recently laid-off talent from AirBnB, Uber and other major tech companies.

"We partnered with Braintrust nine months ago for engineering activities with remote teams," said Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO at TaskRabbit. "It is reassuring to know that critical innovation is still moving forward during these uncertain times and that we have a proven model for how distributed work can work."

What makes Braintrust unique is its governance model: the marketplace is talent-controlled, enabling Braintrust to attract and retain the highest quality people. While other marketplaces take 30-60 percent of the talent's earnings, Braintrust enables the talent to retain 100 percent of their earnings. The benefit for enterprise clients is that Braintrust can dramatically reduce costs and match them with vetted talent, who are very difficult to hire and retain internally, to quickly step in and create value so organizations can reinvest in innovation.

"We have always believed in Braintrust's model, but it is being proven out in real time as a result of the global health crisis," said Ian Lee, Managing Director of IDEO CoLab Ventures. "The work Braintrust is doing to match elite remote talent, remove middle men, and help large enterprises accelerate innovation will be critical to keep the economy growing amid these new, unprecedented circumstances."

About Braintrust
Braintrust's mission is to disrupt traditional hiring methods, reclaiming the value lost and realigning incentives for both talent and organizations, and allowing that value to return to the creators. Braintrust is expected to be the first user-controlled talent network that provides enterprises with highly skilled technical and design talent that they need. Braintrust's unique network model allows talent to retain 100% of their market rate, and enables organizations to spin up flexible teams and make their budgets go 2-3x further by cutting out the middlemen. This new network model of minimizing fees and giving value to the users instead of maximizing fees and concentrating value at the top is uniquely enabled by a blockchain token.

Braintrust is founded by serial entrepreneurs; Adam Jackson and Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski and backed by leading Silicon Valley Investors including True Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Galaxy Ventures and prominent angel investors. Braintrust is a fully distributed network with a presence in 15 countries around the world. For more information, please visit usebraintrust.com.