Appen Completes Acquisition of Figure Eight and Achieves Critical Integration Milestone

Integration Establishes Appen as the Global Leader and Provider of High-Quality, Human-Annotated Data for Machine Learning Models Sydney — April 18, 2019 — Appen Limited, a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), today announced we have completed the acquisition of Figure Eight, which occurred on April 2nd, 2019. In addition, Appen has also achieved a technical integration milestone, as Figure Eight customers now have access to our extensive crowd resources directly through the Figure Eight platform. Appen offers a highly efficient crowd management platform, a scalable, skillful, multilingual crowd, the world’s most innovative customer-facing SaaS platform with ML-assisted annotation, as well as multiple delivery models: open contributors, curated at-home crowds, secure/NDA crowds and on-site workers. The combination of Appen’s skilled and diverse global workforce of more than 1 million global contractors with Figure Eight’s industry-leading data annotation platform creates a robust training data offering designed to enhance AI initiatives for a wide variety of use cases. This offering is uniquely positioned to deliver on the increasing volume, quality and speed requirements for training data to support business innovations and efficiencies which use ML and AI. “With a critical component of our integration complete, we’re excited for the opportunity to deliver immediate value to Figure Eight customers who can now accelerate their AI and machine learning initiatives with the massive scale of Appen’s crowd,” said Mark Brayan, Appen’s Chief Executive Officer. “We’re also pleased to offer even more flexible work from home opportunities to our crowd as a result of integrating with the Figure Eight platform.” Existing Figure Eight platform users will immediately gain access to over 1 million on-demand global crowd workers covering 130 countries across 180 languages and dialects. This expansion in sourced annotators, combined with the automated quality controls and machine learning assisted data annotation tools  of Figure Eight, will allow both Figure Eight and Appen customers to scale their AI initiatives. “We couldn’t be more excited to be officially part of the Appen family and to have achieved this initial integration milestone,” said Becky Scott, Figure Eight’s Chief Operating Officer.   “Together, we provide a single-source global data annotation solution for any company, in any vertical, seeking to advance its use of artificial intelligence.” 

About Appen

Appen is a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Appen brings over 20 years of experience capturing and enriching a wide variety of data types including speech, text, image and video. With deep expertise in more than 180 languages and access to a global crowd of over 1 million skilled contractors, Appen partners with technology, automotive and eCommerce companies — as well as governments worldwide — to help them develop, enhance and use products that rely on natural languages and machine learning.

About Figure Eight

Figure Eight, an Appen company, combines the best of human and machine intelligence to provide high-quality annotated training data that powers the world’s most innovative machine learning and business solutions. With over a decade of experience and 10+ billion judgments, Figure Eight’s enterprise-ready data annotation platform delivers unprecedented quality and scale across a diverse set of industries and use cases.   — Media Contact: Jodie Ruby, VP of Marketing jruby@appen.com +1 425-442-8014