To acquire 100% of the share capital of Quadrant, Appen has announced it will make an upfront cash payment of US$25 million and a potential additional payment of up to US$20 million in Appen shares to be issued on achieving revenue milestones in 2022 and 2023.

Quadrant and Appen (ASX:APX) say the unified business will be strongly positioned to deliver high-quality data to organisations that rely on geolocation for their business, with Quadrant’s Geolancer product, delivering accurate, up-to-date, and manually verified POI data expanding its global reach and scale by tapping into Appen’s global crowd of over one million workers in over 170 countries.

“With the acquisition, we expect Geolancer to become the market-leading POI platform,” Appen said.

Founded in 2014, Quadrant provides mobile location data, POI data, and data compliance services that enable enterprise customers to perform location analytics and derive location-based intelligence.

For location and mobility data, Quadrant says it has over 450 million unique devices seen per month in nearly every country, with delivery frequency as low as 5-minute intervals.

“The acquisition of Quadrant enables Appen to increase our addressable market and to expand our product and service offering to our customers to include more mobile location and POI data capabilities,” said Mark Brayan, Appen Chief Executive Officer.

“We already have the broadest AI training data offering in the industry, and we see an opportunity to grow in the mobile location and POI data space. With Quadrant’s Geolancer and our global crowd, we will be strongly positioned to serve customers’ scale, speed and quality requirements.”

“In an ever-changing world, organizations are searching for data to help understand what is happening in the physical world.” said Mike Davie, CEO, Quadrant.

“The shared vision of Quadrant and Appen to improve solutions with strong data is an exciting next step, enabling our clients to solve big problems that matter.”