Research Outline

Appen, Labelbox, & Ada.Support Customers

Goals

To understand the top industry verticals served by Appen, Labelbox and Ada Support, along with details on example clients. For clients, need to understand the size (revenue/# of employees) of the companies being served, geographical location, tech spend, and decision makers.

Early Findings

Ada Support

  • The main verticals served by Ada Support are banking; insurance; retail and ecommerce, telecom; travel; and utilities.
  • Clients include Shopify, Mailchimp, Telus, Coinbase, Upwork, Air Asia, Scotts, and IAC. Of these, only Mailchimp was not mentioned on the company website.

Labelbox

  • In April 2019 it was reported that Labelbox had about 50 customers. These included FLIR Systems, Lytx, Airbus, Genius Sports and KeepTruckin. Of these, FLIR Systems, Airbus and KeepTruckin were not mentioned on the company website.
  • When no outside reporting was found on the verticals served by Labelbox, we looked to their website which identified transportation, agriculture, medical, insurance, drone & aerial, consumer, manufacturing , and construction.
  • On Key Values, Labelbox describes one customer as "building an AI model from satellite images of trees in order to prevent fires and save lives," and another as "ingesting tens of thousands of radiology exams to produce cancer-spotting algorithms." The specific verticals mentioned are agriculture, medicine, insurance, and dental.

Appen

  • In a company blog post discussing the relaunch of their website, Appen mentions a focus on technology, automotive, financial services, retail, healthcare, and government.
  • An interview with chief executive Mark Brayan that was published in February 2020 had several quotes where Brayan highlighted the companies' growth strategy. This included a broader focus on the tech market; verticals including autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals; and more targeting of mid-sized companies.
  • As of January 2019, the majority of Appen's revenue came from the U.S.
  • In September 2018, Brayan stated that the company would "be dominated by the tech sector," for some time.
  • Appen reported that the "US government interactions are tracking ahead of expectations and the company is likely to be one of the few specialist annotation providers with access, providing a material catalyst to the upside."
  • Appen opened an office in Plano, TX in 2020 and according to a company spokesperson, "This location also gives us a central time and geographical location for our customer base."
  • Google and Microsoft are both clients.

Summary of Findings

  • While we were able to find some data on verticals and clients for each company, overall the data appears to be limited.
  • It is highly unlikely that the number of clients by vertical can be found since none of the companies appear to disclose complete client lists
  • Additionally, data on revenue may be difficult to find for non-public companies, and tech spend could be limited for all companies.