Figure Eight
The CrowdFlower-era annotation platform Appen bought for up to $300M; now fully absorbed.
Acquired — still operating
Acquired by Appen in March 2019 for up to $300M ($175M upfront plus $125M earn-out); assets fully transitioned into Appen by 2020.
About
Figure Eight began in 2007 in San Francisco as Dolores Labs, became CrowdFlower, and rebranded to Figure Eight in 2018. It pioneered crowdsourced data labeling, pairing a contributor crowd with ML-assisted annotation and video object tracking; the company said it delivered 325 million human judgments in 2018 alone. In March 2019 Appen agreed to acquire it for $175M upfront plus up to $125M in earn-out, closed that April, and by 2020 Appen reported all Figure Eight assets fully transitioned. The standalone product no longer exists. It earns a catalog entry as a landmark in annotation-platform history, and as a record of how the market consolidated around a few large vendors.
What it can do
- Crowdsourced labeling across text, image, audio, video
- ML-assisted annotation
- Video object tracking
- Contributor quality controls
- SaaS self-serve platform (historical)
Setup
No longer available as a standalone product; capabilities live on inside Appen.
Prerequisites
Historical entry only.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 5/10
Scored 5/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: founded 2007; $58M raised; Appen acquisition March 2019 for up to $300M, confirmed by TechCrunch and Appen; assets transitioned by 2020. Strengths: historically significant, acquisition facts well documented. Docked for: (1) no standalone product exists anymore; (2) judgment-volume figures are provider-reported. License: defunct commercial product.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 1.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Founded 2007 San Francisco (Dolores Labs/CrowdFlower); $58M raised; 325M human judgments in 2018 (provider-reported).
- · Appen acquisition March 2019: $175M upfront + up to $125M earn-out; closed April 2019; assets fully transitioned by 2020.
- · No standalone product remains; entry is historical, lifecycle=acquired.
- · Manual review: acquisition facts confirmed via TechCrunch, Appen press release, Wikipedia.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.