Incognia Partners with Upwork to Strengthen Marketplace Trust Through Cross-Device and Location Intelligence
As digital work marketplaces scale globally, maintaining platform integrity without disrupting the user experience has become a defining challenge — one that Incognia's next-generation device and location intelligence is now helping Upwork address at scale.
4 min read
Incognia, the leader in cross-device risk intelligence, has announced a new partnership with Upwork (Nasdaq: UPWK), the world's human and AI-powered work marketplace, to enhance platform integrity and ensure a secure, trusted environment for its global community of clients and freelancers. Incognia's cross-device risk platform — combining apartment-level location precision, tamper detection, and device intelligence — provides Upwork with the real-world behavioural signals it needs to strengthen platform safety, support compliance, and make confident, real-time decisions at global scale.
Why Modern Work Marketplaces Need Next-Generation Identity Signals
As remote and digital-first work has become the norm rather than the exception, the trust and safety challenge facing platforms like Upwork has fundamentally changed. Traditional identity verification approaches — built for a world of fixed locations and single devices — are increasingly inadequate for governing activity across a globally distributed workforce that operates across multiple devices, networks, and geographies simultaneously.
What platforms require today are durable, real-world behavioural signals — intelligence that connects digital identities to how users actually operate in the physical world, rather than relying solely on credentials or static profile data that can be manipulated. Incognia's technology addresses this gap by linking device activity to precise location behaviour, enabling Upwork to understand the context behind platform interactions and apply its policies more consistently — without interrupting the day-to-day workflows of the legitimate freelancers and clients who make up the vast majority of its community.
"For more than two decades, Upwork has invested in building a marketplace where businesses and independent professionals can work together with confidence. That means continuously strengthening the systems that protect platform integrity and support compliant, high-quality work. Our partnership with Incognia helps us do that more effectively at a global scale, while keeping the experience seamless for our community."
— Chris Horne, Senior Director, Trust & Safety Investigations and Intelligence, Upwork
How Incognia's Cross-Device Risk Platform Works
Incognia's platform operates across three interconnected layers of intelligence that together create a uniquely precise and tamper-resistant picture of user behaviour:
- Apartment-level location precision — Incognia's location intelligence operates at a granularity that goes significantly beyond city or neighbourhood-level geolocation, enabling the platform to establish highly specific, consistent location patterns associated with legitimate user behaviour and identify anomalies that may signal fraudulent activity
- Tamper detection — the platform actively identifies attempts to manipulate or spoof device and location signals — a growing vector for bad actors seeking to circumvent conventional platform safety measures by presenting falsified digital environments
- Device intelligence — by tracking device-level behavioural patterns across interactions, Incognia builds persistent, cross-device risk profiles that can connect activity across multiple endpoints and flag inconsistencies that are invisible to single-device or single-session detection methods
Safety at Scale, Seamlessness by Design
A critical design principle in the partnership is that stronger safety measures must not come at the cost of the user experience for the legitimate community Upwork serves. Incognia's intelligence operates in the background of platform interactions — surfacing risk signals to Upwork's trust and safety systems without adding friction to the experience for verified users going about their normal work. This balance between proactive risk management and frictionless engagement is increasingly the standard that enterprise-grade digital marketplaces are expected to maintain.
"Trust is paramount in today's digital environment, and to ensure the safety of legitimate users, platforms need modern signals that reflect how users actually operate in the real world. Our partnership with Upwork shows how leading marketplaces are adopting next-generation device and location intelligence to protect their ecosystems at scale, while providing seamless experiences for users."
— André Ferraz, CEO & Co-Founder, Incognia
Record Growth as Enterprises Move to Location-Aware Risk Solutions
The Upwork partnership comes amid record growth for Incognia, as enterprises across industries accelerate their adoption of sophisticated, location-aware solutions for risk mitigation. As the volume and complexity of digital work expands — and as AI tools make certain forms of platform manipulation easier to execute at scale — the demand for intelligence that reflects real-world user behaviour rather than static digital credentials is intensifying across the marketplace and gig economy sectors. More information about Incognia's cross-device risk intelligence platform is available at incognia.com.
Key Takeaways
- Incognia, the leader in cross-device risk intelligence, has partnered with Upwork (Nasdaq: UPWK) to strengthen platform integrity for Upwork's global community of clients and freelancers through device and location intelligence
- Incognia's platform delivers three interconnected layers of protection: apartment-level location precision, active tamper detection, and cross-device behavioural intelligence — connecting digital identities to real-world user behaviour patterns
- The integration enables Upwork to apply its trust and safety policies more consistently at global scale, while keeping day-to-day workflows frictionless for the legitimate users who make up the vast majority of its community
- As remote and digital-first work has normalised, traditional identity verification approaches are increasingly insufficient — modern platforms require durable, real-world behavioural signals that cannot be replicated through credential manipulation alone
- The partnership arrives amid record growth for Incognia, as enterprises across industries accelerate adoption of location-aware risk solutions in response to the growing sophistication of marketplace fraud and AI-enabled manipulation tactics