I've owned APX since around the $2 mark it's a solid well-run...

I've owned APX since around the $2 mark it's a solid well-run business, Mark Brayan seems like a decent leader and the acquisition of Figure 8 may prove to be transformational, but I'd like to see more announcements around progress to automate the process by which they annotate and refine data for clients.

I do also work as a part of their crowd sourced team from time to time; being wedded to crowd sourced contractors is probably the single biggest expense for the business by far, and does act like a handbrake to a degree on their ability to scale, ie there are few barriers to entry in the data sourcing/annotating space and there's only a finite capacity APX has to expand their margin, as the person annotating the data usually always commands around $18-$20USD/hr.

In a sense, the business model is kinda similar to Uber - low barriers to entry (likely to give rise to increasing competition if they try to expand their margins) and they're always wedded to paying the person annotating the data, like Uber is to the person driving the car. I'm sure Uber is likewise, making efforts to reduce reliance on humans doing the driving (holy grail scenario).

XRO runs a business model with a far greater capacity to scale and greater opportunity for margin expansion over time.

This being said, I feel the growth runway in the short-medium term is still sound.

Just my 2c worth.