Figure Eight Inc.

Last updated
Figure Eight Inc.
Industry Machine learning and Artificial intelligence
FoundedDecember 2007 (2007-12)
Founder Lukas Biewald
Chris Van Pelt
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
United States
Number of employees
500-1000
Parent Appen
Website www.figure-eight.com

Figure Eight (formerly known as Dolores Labs, CrowdFlower) was a human-in-the-loop machine learning and artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

Contents

Figure Eight technology uses human intelligence to do simple tasks such as transcribing text or annotating images to train machine learning algorithms. [1] Figure Eight's software automates tasks for machine learning algorithms, which can be used to improve catalog search results, approve photos or support customers and the technology can be used in the development of self-driving cars, intelligent personal assistants and other technology that uses machine learning. [2]

The company was acquired by Appen in March 2019 for $300 million. [3]

History

Establishment

Originally called Dolores Labs, the company was founded in 2007 by Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt. [4] They found a need for temporary workers doing simple tasks that could not be automated. [5] After experimenting with pictures and questions related to them on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing internet marketplace, they encouraged others to participate in their experimentation through the site Facestat. They collected 20 million assessments of people's faces within three months and began to add queries for companies needing data such as event listing site Zvents and O'Reilly Media. [6]

Dolores Labs, initially in a loft space in the Mission District briefly moved to an office on Valencia Street which it outgrew in nine months. [7] They felt the name Dolores Labs was too research-oriented and sounded like experimentation, so the company was renamed CrowdFlower. In 2009, CrowdFlower held an official launch at the TechCrunch50 conference. A sleek logo replaced its previous mint-eating alligator. The company moved to its third office in the Mission in early 2010. [8] The name Dolores Labs was adopted by Dan Scholnick of Trinity Ventures who turned the name and previous office space into a co-working and startup incubator space. [7]

Disaster relief

In 2009, the company provided work for refugees in Kenya who completed microtasks; iPhone users donated their time by checking for accuracy through the app Give Work. [9] After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, CrowdFlower again worked with Samasource to help Haitians find work through the application GiveWork. [10] [11]

Funding and expansion

Founders Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt were included on Inc.'s 30 Under 30 list in 2010. [12]

In 2011, CrowdFlower raised a Series B funding round that totaled $9.3 million and included investor Harmony Venture Partners. The company's Series C funding, which closed in September 2014, totaled $12.5 million. [13] In 2014, CrowdFlower was named Best in Show at FinovateFall. [14] [15]

The company established a scientific advisory board in 2016, which made up of entrepreneur Barney Pell, founder and CEO of Kaggle Anthony Goldbloom, and staff research engineer at Google, Pete Warden. [16] That same year, it raised a $10 million Series D funding round led by Microsoft Ventures, Canvas Ventures and Trinity Ventures. [17] The following year, CrowdFlower raised $20 million in a venture capital round led by Industry Ventures and included Salesforce Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Microsoft Ventures, and Trinity Ventures. [18] The company announced its international expansion with an office in Israel in October 2016. [19]

CrowdFlower was named to the 2017 list of Cool Vendors released by Gartner. [20] That same year, it received AWS Machine Learning Competency status from Amazon Web Services. [21] In 2018, CrowdFlower was included on the Forbes list of 100 Companies Leading the Way in A.I. [22]

Sale and dissolution

The company raised $58 million in venture capital and was acquired by Appen in March 2019 for $300 million. [3] In 2020 Appen announced that it had " successfully transitioned all former Figure Eight assets." [23]

Technology

In June 2012, the company released version 2.0 of its Real Time Foto Moderator which checks photographs for adult or inappropriate content. The new version included two different "rule sets" to determine appropriate photos including a stricter rule set and one that is more flexible. The update also added an option for moderators to specify why a photo is rejected. [24] That same year, Parse partnered with CrowdFlower to add photo moderation to its backend services designed for mobile app development. [25]

In November 2014, CrowdFlower announced that it was releasing support for eight new languages crowds to its platform, making twelve available language crowds at the time. [26]

In 2015, CrowdFlower AI launched at the Rich Data Summit. The AI platform combines machine learning and human-labeled training data to create data sets used for predictive models. [27]

In 2015, CrowdFlower announced the Data For Everyone initiative, which included a collection of data sets available to researchers and entrepreneurs. [28]

Partners and collaboration

Microsoft partnered with CrowdFlower in October 2016 to create a "human-in-the-loop" platform using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. [29] In May 2017, CrowdFlower released an enhancement for its Computer Vision software, announced during the Train AI conference, designed to simplify and speed up the process of annotating images. [30]

Figure Eight held TrainAI, a conference held in San Francisco. In 2017, the company launched AI for Everyone at the TrainAI conference. [31] AI For Everyone is a contest run by Figure Eight for non-profit ventures and scientific research that aims to improve society by awarding $1 million in prize money that will go toward projects using AI. [32] Six winners have been announced as of February 2018 to projects ranging from computer vision for cancer research to natural language processing for hate speech. [33]

The company was a Machine Learning Competency Partner in Amazon's AWS Machine Learning Partner Solutions program.[ clarification needed ] [34] Figure Eight works with companies such as Autodesk, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Cisco Systems, GitHub, Mozilla, VMware, [2] eBay, Etsy, Toyota and American Express. [35]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Lange</span> Danish computer scientist

Danny B. Lange is a Danish computer scientist who has worked on machine learning for IBM, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Uber, and Unity Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Splunk</span> American technology company

Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface.

ExtraHop is a cybersecurity company providing AI-based network intelligence that stops advanced threats across cloud, hybrid, and distributed environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lukas Biewald</span> American businessman

Lukas Biewald is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. Biewald was the founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. — an Internet company that collects training data for machine learning — which he co-founded in December 2007 with Chris Van Pelt. In 2019, Biewald sold Figure Eight to Appen for 300 million dollars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maluuba</span> Canadian technology company

Maluuba is a Canadian technology company conducting research in artificial intelligence and language understanding. Founded in 2011, the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Datadog</span> Monitoring platform for cloud applications

Datadog is an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Redis (company)</span>

Redis Ltd. is a private computer software company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Redis is the sponsor of the open-source in-memory NoSQL database of the same name and the provider of Redis Enterprise software, cloud services, and tools for global companies. The company’s research and development center is based in Tel Aviv and it has additional offices in London, Austin, and Bengaluru.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trifacta</span>

Trifacta is a privately owned software company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Bengaluru, Boston, Berlin and London. The company was founded in October 2012 and primarily develops data wrangling software for data exploration and self-service data preparation on cloud and on-premises data platforms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mustafa Suleyman</span> British entrepreneur and activist

Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Google and now owned by Alphabet. His current venture is Inflection AI.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Databricks</span> Modern Cloud Data Platform

Databricks is an American enterprise software company founded by the creators of Apache Spark. Databricks develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks.

Alteryx is an American computer software company based in Irvine, California, with a development center in Broomfield, Colorado. The company's products are used for data science and analytics. The software is designed to make advanced analytics accessible to any data worker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M12 (venture capital)</span> American corporate venture capital subsidiary of Microsoft

M12, formerly Microsoft Ventures, is a corporate venture capital subsidiary of Microsoft. Founded in March 2016, its mission is to be an active, strategic partner during a startup's growth, typically investing between Series A and D. The fund is managed by Michelle Gonzalez, formerly of Google.

D2iQ is an American technology company based in San Francisco, California which develops software that simplifies Kubernetes lifecycle management, deployment to hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments and enables advanced application use cases. Its flagship product is called the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP).

Numerai is an AI-run, crowd-sourced hedge fund based in San Francisco. It was created by South African technologist Richard Craib in October 2015. Its primary competitors are other open source trading platforms mainly CrunchDAO, QuantConnect, and WorldQuant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peak (company)</span>

Peak is an Artificial Intelligence company headquartered in Manchester, UK. It was founded in 2015 and has additional offices in Jaipur, India, and New York City, USA. It is known for its Artificial Intelligence platform, a SaaS platform that allows data scientists to build AI workflows, invoke them on ingested data and expose the results via APIs and/or built-in web applications, as well as abstracting the underlying cloud infrastructure.

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

Wasabi Technologies, Inc. is an American object storage service provider based in Boston, Massachusetts that sells one product, an object storage service called Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. The company was co-founded in September 2015 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers and launched its cloud storage product in May 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Element AI</span> Canadian software company

Element AI was an artificial intelligence company based in Montreal, Quebec.

SOPHiA GENETICS is a data-driven medicine software company with headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston, Massachusetts. It provides genomic and radiomic analysis for hospitals, laboratories, and biopharma institutions. The company was ranked among the 50 smartest companies by the MIT Technology Review in 2017. The company went public on the Nasdaq in 2021, floating at $1.1B.

References

  1. ↑ Ha, Anthony (June 7, 2016). "CrowdFlower raises $10M to combine artificial intelligence with crowdsourced labor". Tech Crunch. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
  2. 1 2 Bort, Julie (October 15, 2017). "Founder of $111 million startup CrowdFlower: I'm forever grateful to Travis Kalanick". Business Insider. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
  3. 1 2 Bridgwater, Adrian (March 7, 2016). "Machine Learning Needs A Human-In-The-Loop". Forbes. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
  4. ↑ "CrowdFlower CO-Founder Lukas Biewald Becomes CEO (Again)". 22 March 2012.
  5. ↑ Louis E. Boone, David L. Kurtz (January 1, 2012). Contemporary Marketing, 2013 Update. Cengage Learning. ISBN   9781133710455.
  6. ↑ Victoria Barret (13 March 2009). "Dolores Labs' Frivolous Inspiration". Forbes.
  7. 1 2 "Recreating a Culture of Innovation".
  8. ↑ "Mercury News interview: Lukas Biewald, co-founder/CEO, CrowdFlower". 20 April 2012.
  9. ↑ Oshiro, Dana (2009-10-13). "Samasource / CrowdFlower iPhone App Helps Refugees Fight Poverty". Readwriteweb.com. Archived from the original on 2012-01-01. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
  10. ↑ "Crowdsourcing the Haiti Relief | The CrowdFlower Blog". Blog.crowdflower.com. 2010-01-29. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
  11. ↑ "Samasource and CrowdFlower in Haiti: Rebuilding After a Crisis". Huffington Post. 2010-03-19. Retrieved 2018-06-06.
  12. ↑ "Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, Founders of Crowdflower".
  13. ↑ Derrick Harris. "CrowdFlower raises $12.5M to deliver better data for better models". gigaom.com.
  14. ↑ "How All 7 of This Year's FinovateFall Best of Show Winners Hit the Mark With Innovation and Utility".
  15. ↑ "CrowdFlower Raises $20 Million to Bloom AI Adoption". 13 June 2017.
  16. ↑ Anthony Ha (6 November 2016). "CrowdFlower announces a scientific advisory board as it works to combine AI and crowdsourcing". TechCrunch.
  17. ↑ Todd Bishop (6 June 2016). "Microsoft Ventures invests in Comfy smart building app and CrowdFlower AI tech". GeekWire.
  18. ↑ Kyt Dotson (12 June 2017). "AI-augmented crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower raises $20M for enterprise push". Silicon Angle.
  19. ↑ "CrowdFlower expands into Israel". PR Newswire. 25 October 2016.
  20. ↑ "And the 2017 Cool Vendors Are". June 2017.
  21. ↑ Joseph Spisak (28 November 2017). "Introducing the Inaugural AWS Machine Learning Competency Partners". AWS.
  22. ↑ Nicolas Rapp (28 January 2018). "These 100 Companies Are Leading the Way in A.I." Fortune.
  23. ↑ "Appen Offers Fully Integrated Figure Eight Solution". Appen. 16 April 2020. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
  24. ↑ "CrowdFlower's Photo Moderation Tool Gets A Little More Flexible". 21 June 2012.
  25. ↑ "Parse Adds Crowdflower's Photo Moderation To Its Mobile Backend Services". 18 December 2012.
  26. ↑ "CrowdFlower's Data Enrichment Platform Now Supports Eight New Languages".
  27. ↑ "CrowdFlower raises $10 million from Microsoft and others to bring A.I. to data science". Venturebeat. 7 June 2016.
  28. ↑ "CrowdFlower Launches Open Data Project Covering Everything From Climate Change To #ThatDress". 3 March 2015.
  29. ↑ "CrowdFlower partnership with Microsoft brings power of 'human-in-the-loop' to machine learning".
  30. ↑ "CrowdFlower Announces Next Generation Computer Vision Solution".
  31. ↑ "How artificial intelligence might help achieve the SDGs".
  32. ↑ "Top 5 AI Challenges For Startups & Programmers To Participate In 2018". 7 February 2018.
  33. ↑ "CrowdFlower "AI for Everyone" Challenge Announces Winners and Opens Applications for Next Round". 30 January 2018.
  34. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (November 28, 2017). "AWS launches new partner programs for networking and machine learning specialists". Tech Crunch. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
  35. ↑ Zakrzewski, Cat (June 12, 2017). "CrowdFlower Combines Crowdsourcing and Machine Intelligence". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 13, 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.