<p><strong>Appen is buying Figure Eight technologies for $250...

<p><strong>Appen is buying Figure Eight technologies for $250 million</strong>, plus an earn-out consideration of about $86 million to $114 million (capped at $178 million). <strong>Figure Eight, previously called Crowdflower</strong>,
is a San Francisco based company with about 107 employees and 200
customers that sells machine learning software to "transform
unstructured text, image, audio, and video data into customised high
quality artificial intelligence training data". </p><p>To pay for the purchase Appen is doing a <strong>$285 million placement at $21.50 per share, a 12 per cent discount</strong>. It has also struck a new syndicated banking loan for $125 million, on top of an existing $60 million debt facility. </p><p data-gtm-vis-recent-on-screen-6236702_632="1552258514968" data-gtm-vis-first-on-screen-6236702_632="1552258514968" data-gtm-vis-total-visible-time-6236702_632="4000" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-6236702_632="1">"The
union of Appen and Figure Eight creates a unique, exciting and powerful
opportunity for our customers," Appen chief executive <strong>Mark Brayan</strong> said. </p><p>"We
now have the best of both worlds: Appen's highly efficient crowd
management platform and scalable, skilful multi-lingual crowd, combine
with Figure Eight's innovative customer facing SaaS platform...we expect
to meet and exceed our customers' scale, speed and quality
requirements". </p>