Appen riding the tailwind of Artificial Intelligence

The Appen share price has seen shareholders collect returns exceeding 200 per cent over the past year and 2000 percent since listing (200X return ) and is showing little sign of slowing!

Revenue is up 50 per cent to $166.6M for the financial year 2017, with an EBITDA of $28.1M.

Appen’s CEO, Marc Brayan,  (serial CEO of listed companies) says the sharemarket will reward you if you have strong financial performance and a clear value proposition that is easy to understand (a killer 30 second pitch)

How it started

As 50 something empty nesters, 20 years ago, Julie and Chris Vonwiller founded Australia’s fastest growing listed company on the ASX !

Julie (a renowned Linguist) set up a small consulting business called Appen, while her husband Chris helped out while working his day job as a senior executive at Telstra. 

 

Who knew that asking Apple’s Siri virtual assistant to “call mum”, or a teenage girl’s obsession with finding out which outfit looks best by asking Amazon’s assistant Alexa could help propel Appen to such great heights?

 So what does Appen do?

Appen’s mission is to be the world’s leading provider of search relevance services.

They develop human-annotated data sets for machine learning and artificial intelligence, providing nine of the top 10 global technology companies with the data necessary to develop machine learning algorithms and improve their search function.

It has a crowdsourced global model employing 30k to 40k team of contractors that train the companies machine learning capabilities. It provides their clients “data sets” that mimics a human function – speech sight or a complex decision. 

CEO, Mark Brayan,  has said there continues to be a massive appetite and demand for Appens  services – and there is an opportunity to ride the tailwind of the AI and machine learning opportunity.

Acquisition Trail

Appen have just invested $105.3m in 2 companies that develop advanced, machine learning-based toolsets to streamline and automate data collection. 

Leapforce Inc and Raterlabs Inc

These investments will add  “scale and scope” to Appen’s plans to have a bigger impact on the growing artificial intelligence market

About Leapforce

Leapforce specialises in search relevance with a highly automated, proprietary end-to-end technology platform and generated US$58 million in revenue and US$13.6 million in EBITDA in 2017. 

About Raterlabs 

Raterlabs Inc facilitate working from home services that seek to evaluate search engine results.   

Posted on June 30, 2018