AppTek Announces Merger with Ignite-Tek
AppTek Announces Merger with Ignite-Tek, Appoints Mike Ferzacca Chief Operating Officer
Acquisition accelerates the Company’s already-significant 2019 market momentum, expanding AppTek’s expert team and extending its advanced speech technology market offerings
McLean, VA-- November 19, 2019-- AppTek, a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), today announced its merger with Ignite-Tek, further accelerating the company’s notable momentum throughout 2019. For over ten years, Ignite-Tek, now a wholly owned subsidiary, has been the leading customer acquisition engine for performance- based media buying, helpingconsumer-oriented e-commerce companies more effectively gather marketing intelligence to optimize messaging effectiveness, business productivity and lifetime customer value.The merger exemplifies AppTek’s continuing significant growth and resource investment. The company has doubled its team in 2019, and expanded utilization of its workbench platform, which is already used by more than 1000 speech annotators, to accelerate the creation of new language models. Large-scale, multilingual data sets are critical for the Machine Learning capability that is foundational to AppTek’s market-leading speech technology platform. The company’s continually expanding language support already includes 30+ languages and dialects for ASR, 40+ direct MT Languages, and 400+ language pairs, with more in development.
AppTek CEO Mudar Yaghi said, “Our merger with our long-time partner Ignite-Tek is a great step for our high-growth company. Ignite brings experience driving over $1.2B in revenue for its clients since its inception, and its LucidVueCX platform for cross-channel behavioral and sentiment analysis is the perfect addition to AppTek’s suite of capabilities. By combining our teams, technologies and deep expertise, we will take these already leading-edge capabilities to the next level, allowing customers to tap the benefits of speech technologies across a wide range of uses.”
AppTek will be bringing on former Ignite CEO, Michael Ferzacca as COO. “This combination allows for even faster growth to take place by adding the experienced application-based team from Ignite. Ferzacca will be building on his long history of driving growth and building businesses including Ignite, Simplexity, Cable and Wireless, and Xerox,” continued Yaghi.
Ferzacca stated that “AppTek is incredibly well positioned to address the current, unprecedented moment in the $32B speech technology market. The escalating power and benefits of AI, ML and NMT are poised to drive quantum technological advances, transforming life as we know it and benefitting communication in ways never before considered possible. I could not be more excited to be a part of it.”
