Appen
Level 6, 9 Help Street, Chatswood, New South Wales, 2067, Australia
Overview
Appen offers a wide variety of services to technology companies seeking to compete and expand in the global marketplace. Our services are tailored to fit the specific needs of each client project — ranging from acting as an accelerator for rapid market expansion to acting as an enabler with large-scale data for established technology. We provide solutions for clients with complex and novel language resource requirements by understanding the issues that lie at the intersection of language and technology. For example, Appen has tailored multi-language database development programs for a number of clients that address language, content and data volume dynamically by designing an engagement model that allows many of these variables to remain flexible. This approach allows us to accommodate changes in client requirements and priorities over an extended development timeframe. We help clients launch language technologies in a broad range of specialized fields such as: - Speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies - Text analytics/opinion mining/sentiment analysis - Search (consumer and enterprise, horizontal and vertical) - Natural language processing - Machine translation - Predictive text input - Handwriting recognition Clients working with emerging technologies benefit from our experience when transitioning a single-language linguistic component to a scalable development process across multiple languages. For clients working with developed technology, we define, plan and execute multi-lingual projects, creating and implementing processes and tracking progress. Appen also has a social media division offering a moderation platform called Social Instinct (www.socialinstinct.com), which moderates content and images for its clients' social media channels in multiple languages.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 1
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 7
Sector focus
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Crowdsourcing
- Data Collection and Labeling
- Enterprise Software
- Social Media
- Software
- Translation Service
Investment portfolio
- Mindtech
Led · Equity · Mar 2022
Mindtech Global is a developer of DataOps platforms that produce intelligently engineered synthetic data to train AI vision systems. Its core products, Chameleon and Dolphin, enable data analysis, visualisation and curation to improve AI models and accelerate deployment of customer applications across smart city and other use cases. The company serves sectors including retail, healthcare, transportation and robotics and has operations across the US and the Far East. Led by CEO Steve Harris, Mindtech employs around 25 people. Following a funding round of over £4M led by Edge Investments with participation from Mercia Ventures, the company plans to further develop its technology and expand into Japan, the US and Europe. It also intends to continue partnerships with industry leaders to scale adoption of its synthetic-data platforms. Mindtech is a Sheffield, UK–based provider of an end-to-end synthetic data creation platform for training AI vision systems. Led by CEO Steve Harris, the company's Chameleon platform generates synthetic training data to help computers understand and predict human interactions across retail, smart home, healthcare and smart city applications. In the latest round Mindtech raised $3.7M led by Appen, which also signed a commercial partnership to drive adoption of synthetic data. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and broaden its business reach. Existing investors participated in the round. This investment follows a $3.25M funding round in July 2021. Mindtech Global’s core product, Chameleon, creates unlimited photo‑realistic 3D scenes and synthetic humans to train CCTV and other computer-vision systems without using real-world footage. The platform targets customers including large retailers, warehouse operators, healthcare providers, transportation systems and robotics firms. Mindtech positions synthetic data as a way to avoid privacy issues, reduce bias in training data, and speed up ML development by cutting time spent sourcing and cleaning footage. The company says Chameleon lets teams build and run scenarios thousands of times to teach systems to spot events such as slips, delivery-robot interactions with children, or erratic behavior on train platforms. Management intends to use the new funding to accelerate growth and commercial traction. No operating metrics or valuation were disclosed in the article.