LXT Acquires clickworker in Data-for-AI Market Consolidation Move

AI training data provider LXT has announced that it will acquire clickworker, a German platform that manages millions of freelancers working with data for AI. The deal is expected to close mid-January 2025, pending legal and regulatory approvals.

Prior to the acquisition, the two companies had had limited dealings with one another, and were mostly seen as competitors, LXT Founder and CEO Mohammad Omar told Slator. 

Through the end of 2024, clickworker will operate as an independent division of LXT, after which the team and its technology will be integrated into LXT.

Christian Rozensich, clickworker’s current Managing Director, will be appointed LXT’s Chief Technology Officer, tasked with overseeing the transition, in addition to further development of the technological platform.

Beyond clickworker’s contingent of 6 million crowdworkers across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, LXT’s new headcount will be approximately 600. 

Toronto-headquartered LXT was founded in 2010, with locations in the US, UK, Egypt, India, Turkey, Romania, and Australia, and now serves more than 145 countries.

LXT got its start providing high-quality Arabic data for a Big Tech client, later expanding to cover “over 1,000 language locales,” including a significant number across Africa and South Asia.

While the work LXT does feeds into translation applications, the company does not aim to specialize in translation or localization per se, LXT Chief Revenue Officer Phil Hall explained in a January 2023 SlatorPod episode.

LXT’s main use cases include AR/VR; computer vision; conversational AI; search; and NLP.

“We are essentially a services company, but we’re a services company with ambitions to be more of a technology company in the future,” said Hall, a former longtime executive at data-for-AI giant Appen, noting that, at that point in time, M&A was “absolutely there in our growth strategy.”

Platforms and Profits

According to Omar, over the past three years, “LXT has achieved tremendous growth of 4x.” LXT expects contributions from clickworker — previously under shared ownership of founders and PE and VC firms — to help double revenues again in 2025.

“This deal adds more than 500 enterprise clients to our portfolio, increasing our customer base and significantly broadening our global footprint,” Omar added.

Essen, Germany-headquartered clickworker was founded in 2005. Its flagship, highly automated platform offers mobile-first and desktop options for its freelancers, who completed more than 600 million jobs in 2022. 

The plans for integrating clickworker include the development of “Domain Specific Super Expert communities, allowing the crowd to more effectively leverage their expertise,” according to the press release.

As models and compute are scaling rapidly the need for human-created, curated, and annotated data is passionately debated within the AI community. Alexandr Wang, CEO of LXT competitor Scale, explained in a December 2024 podcast how “data limitations hinder AI model progress despite increased computational power.” Should this view prevail, an enlarged LXT would be among the prime beneficiaries as hyperscalers like Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft / OpenAI, or Amazon ramp up their search for more high-quality data.