Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together

Appen just announced that it's acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront, with an additional payment of up to $125 million based on Figure Eight's performance this year. Both companies focus on using crowdsourced labor pools to annotate data, which in turn is used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning -- for example, Figure Eight (formerly known as CrowdFlower and Dolores Labs) says its technology has been for everything from mapping to stock photography to scanning receipts for expense reports. Appen, meanwhile, is a publicly-traded company headquartered in Sydney. CEO Mark Brayan described its technology -- and its "crowd" of more than 1 million remote workers -- as "highly complementary" to Figure Eight, which he praised for its data annotation and self-serve capabilities. "We know that to compete and to be able to deliver even higher volumes, we need a richer set of technologies," Brayan said.