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.
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.
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.
Have you used the platform? It’s fairly impressive and not what you describe at all.
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