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Appen acquires machine learning data startup Figure Eight for up to $300M
Australia search and language data services firm Appen Ltd. today said it has acquired rival Figure Eight Inc. for $175 million upfront with an additional earn-out payment of up to $125 million in 2020 based on performance.
To fund the deal, Appen has announced an AU$285 million ($200 million) fundraising targeted at institutional investors, according to The Australian Financial Review.
Founded in 2007 as CrowdFlower Inc., Figure Eight offers a “human-in-the-loop” machine learning platform that offers quality training data needed by ML and artificial intelligence services.
The company uses both human and machine intelligence to provide annotated training data for a wide variety of computer vision and natural language processing tasks: video object tracking, autonomous vehicles, robotics, predictive maintenance, facial recognition, medical images, aerial and satellite imagery, consumer product detection, content categorization, intelligent chatbots, document transcription and various other fields that use both AI and machine learning.
Australian Stock Exchange-listed Appen, founded in 2011, offers a somewhat similar range of services as Figure Eight, with the addition of more advanced services for natural language processing.
“The union of Appen and Figure Eight creates a unique, exciting and powerful opportunity for our customers,” Appen Chief Executive Officer Mark Brayan said in a statement. “We now have the best of both worlds: our highly efficient cloud management platform and scalable, skillful multilingual crowd, combined with Figure Eight’s innovative customer-facing SaaS platform with ML-assisted annotation. Combined, we’ll meet and exceed our customers’ scale, speed and quality requirements.”
San Francisco-based Figure Eight will continue to operate as an independent business through the end of 2019.
The company had raised $58 million in venture capital funding including $20 million in 2017 and $10 million in 2016. Investors include M12, Trinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Promus Ventures and Canvas Ventures.
It’s not clear how markets have responded to the deal since Appen put itself into a voluntary trading halt before making the announcement Monday morning Australian EDT.
Image: geralt/Pixabay
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