YunoJuno Brand Guidelines: A 2012 London Freelancer Network Built by Freelancers

Three founders, a London network and a bootstrapped product.

YunoJuno is a London company. Companies House records YunoJuno Limited as incorporated on 25 June 2012, first under a placeholder name and renamed a few days later, in July 2012. Its first directors included Shib Mathew and Hugo Rodger-Brown. The register classes the business under temporary employment agency activities and lists the company as active in November 2026.

The company tells its own story as a timeline. It says its founders, who came from the creative and technology industries, began meeting in London in January 2012 to plan “a direct, transparent and exclusive community for freelancers and clients.” In April they tested the idea on their own freelancer and client contacts, and that group became the founding members of the network. In June, the company says, the three founders put their own savings into the business and, practising what they preached, hired freelancers to build the first version of the product.

That first version went live in February 2013. YunoJuno says it was “built entirely by the freelancer network” and that the first freelancer booking came the day after release. Angel investors joined in 2012 and 2013, according to the same timeline, and the team took its first office in London’s W1 district in January 2015, moving to Bermondsey in 2017 and to Soho in 2019.

Independent coverage gives the same start date. In May 2019 the trade site Online Marketplaces quoted Shib Mathew, then described as chief executive and founder, saying: “Since we launched in London in 2012, we have established a strong reputation as the city’s leading freelancer platform.” In a March 2022 interview with TechRound, Mathew said he had worked in advertising and technology, had often hired freelancers and had freelanced himself, and that the company grew from two observations: that freelancing was rising, and that the way freelancers and hirers found each other was still manual and opaque.

From a creative network to contractor management.

YunoJuno started narrow. Online Marketplaces described it in 2019 as a platform for the “elite freelance creative network,” with more than 18,000 designers, developers, copywriters and project managers across tech, marketing, creative and advertising work, and reported that it planned to expand from London to the North West of England, starting in Manchester. In the 2022 TechRound interview, Mathew described a curated marketplace for the creative industries that had grown to more than 70,000 vetted freelancers and about 12,000 hiring companies.

The product described in that interview covers the whole engagement: matching a freelancer to a brief, direct messages between client and freelancer with no intermediary, contracts, time tracking, billing and reporting. That is the shape of the business today. The company’s website now presents YunoJuno as a freelance management platform, with tools for direct sourcing, onboarding, contracts, payments and reporting, alongside a talent marketplace, services for creators and influencers, and compliance tools for contractors in the UK and the United States.

Compliance became a selling point after a change in British tax rules. The company says it prepared its clients and freelancers for the UK government’s IR35 reform for the self-employed, which took effect in April 2021, and its website lists IR35 and sole-trader compliance among its services.

The scale has grown with the product. The company now says it connects businesses and independent professionals in more than 165 countries, with a network of more than 150,000 freelancers and more than 12,000 clients. Those are the company’s own figures.

How the category presents itself.

Freelance and creative-talent marketplaces describe themselves in a small set of words. DesignCrowd’s about page calls it an online creative marketplace that connects businesses with a global network of designers; English Wikipedia describes Crowdspring as a marketplace for crowdsourced creative services. Category names on these sites are practical rather than poetic: logo and identity, web, print, product and merchandise, art and illustration, with designer directories sorted by type, country and city.

The client’s first screen is usually a brief. When Slate tested Crowdspring in May 2011, posting a job meant filling in a “creative brief” form with set questions about what a logo should communicate. Contest sites then add their own rules on top of the brief. DesignCrowd’s how-it-works page lets a client choose a three-, five- or ten-day deadline, keeps designers from seeing one another’s entries and passes full copyright in the winning files to the client.

Showcase work is presented plainly, as entries and finished projects rather than as campaigns. Slate found that anyone could browse other people’s projects and, in many cases, their submissions, and that the site prompted clients to rate entries on a five-star scale and send feedback. Forbes reported in 2009 that Crowdspring offered larger buyers a Pro option that hid submissions from public view, and that its own logo came through its marketplace.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. DesignCrowd’s about section names its founder and chief executive and has a separate board and investors page listing its venture backers, while dated press releases record new country sites and new brands. This guide sets out what can be checked about each marketplace — who founded it, who owns it and how its interface works — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand refreshed by its own freelancers.

The company has made its own freelancer community part of its identity. Since December 2015 it has run the Freelancer Awards, an annual ceremony for freelancers in the UK that it says draws public nominations and votes; by the 2022 TechRound interview the awards were in their seventh year, and Mathew called them the biggest event of their kind in the UK. In November 2021 the company refreshed its website and brand, and says the work was carried out by its own freelancer community, which it calls eating “our own dog food.” Its tone in its own history is informal, with jokes about office moves, cake and cycling clubs.

The management has changed as the business has grown. YunoJuno says Runar Reistrup, previously chief executive of the resale app Depop, became chief executive in December 2020, with Shib Mathew moving to executive chairman, and that the former Shpock executive Joao Martires joined as chief operating officer in September 2021. Companies House lists both Reistrup and Martires among the directors in 2026.

The company also moved beyond London. It says it launched in New York in July 2017 and took on a development team in Minsk in 2018; its website today gives offices in London and New York. The UK company remains its registered home.

For a design guide, YunoJuno shows how a brand built around a curated creative network can stretch to cover contracts, payments and compliance while keeping a warm, informal voice. Compare PeoplePerHour, another London freelance marketplace, and Malt, a European network for independents. For this guide we use a deep violet, a soft cream and a coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep YunoJuno’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.