Appen (company)

Appen Limited (formerly known as Appen Butler Hill) is a publicly traded data company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) under the code APX.

History
Appen was founded in Sydney in 1996 by linguist Dr. Julie Vonwiller. She was joined by her husband Chris Vonwiller who left his job at Telstra in 2000 to join Appen full-time and is currently Non-Executive Chairman of Appen.

In 2011, Appen merged with the Butler Hill Group, which was based in Ridgefield, Connecticut and Seattle, Washington and originally founded by Lisa Braden-Harder in 1993. Braden-Harder was a member of the pioneering team in grammar checking technology at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center before the Butler Hill Group and stayed on as CEO until 2015.

In 2012, Appen acquired Wikman Remer, a firm based in San Rafael, California, which developed tools and platforms for employee engagement, online moderation and curation.

Appen Butler Hill was re-branded as Appen in 2013. The company went public on the ASX on January 7, 2015, led by Lisa Braden-Harder. In July 2015, Mark Brayan joined Appen as CEO.

In October 2016, Appen acquired a UK-based transcription services company called Mendip Media Group (MMG). Appen also acquired Leapforce in November 2017 for US$80 million, adding additional capabilities in search relevance. Appen acquired Figure Eight in 2019. In 2021, Appen announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Quadrant, a global leader in mobile location data, Point-of-Interest data, and corresponding compliance services.

In December 2022, Armughan Ahmad succeeded Brayan as CEO and President of Appen. On February 5, 2024, Ahmad resigned from his position and was replaced by the company's COO, Ryan Kolln.

Operations
At the end of 2017, revenues were A$166.6 million and the company had more than 350 full-time employees and over 1,000,000 approved flexible workers in the Appen crowd. Tasks are performed in more than 180 languages and 130 countries.

Most of the company's revenues are earned offshore. Clients include eight of the top ten largest technology companies.

Appen's customers use machine learning for a variety of use cases including automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer vision, increasing conversions in eCommerce, delivering more meaningful and personalized advertising, enhancing social media feeds or improving customer service capabilities with tools like chatbots and virtual assistants.

Locations
The company's corporate headquarters is in Chatswood, New South Wales, 10 kilometres north of the central business district of Sydney, Australia. The United States headquarters is in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, and there is also an office in Sunnyvale, California. Appen has a global presence all over of the world including Toronto, Canada; Beijing, China; Cavite, Philippines; Exeter, England; and Tokyo, Japan.