The human layer behind enterprise AI. iMerit labels, enriches and refines the data that trains, tunes and evaluates the world's machine learning and generative AI models - and in 2026 agreed to be acquired by EXL for up to $310 million.
iMerit Technology. A stylized wordmark stands in for the company logo. Founder & CEO Radha Basu built the firm from a nonprofit skilling mission into a global AI-data operation.
Every AI model that recognizes a tumor, steers a car, or answers a question in plain English learned from data that a human first organized, labeled and checked. iMerit is one of the companies that does that unglamorous, foundational work - at scale, and with a focus on the parts that are hard to automate.
Founded in 2012 by Radha Basu, iMerit built a global operation that combines a specialized human workforce with software to annotate, enrich and evaluate data across text, images, video, audio, 3D point clouds and medical scans. Its clients are Fortune 500 enterprises and leading AI labs building systems in autonomous vehicles, healthcare, agriculture, geospatial and finance.
In June 2026, enterprise-AI and analytics firm EXL announced a definitive agreement to acquire iMerit for up to $310 million - $170 million upfront plus up to $140 million tied to milestones - a signal of how valuable expert data has become to the AI economy.
Both companies share a belief that specialized, high-quality data is the foundation of AI success.
Illustrative view of iMerit's service focus areas across modalities. Not a financial breakdown.
A flexible data-annotation and model fine-tuning platform spanning images, video, text, audio, 3D point clouds and medical DICOM data - with workflow design, model integration, RLHF and analytics in one place.
Since 2022An elite network of physicians, scientists, engineers and linguists embedded directly into AI development - the domain knowledge that crowd-sourced annotation can't provide.
Since 2024An integrated multimodal environment inside Ango Hub that pairs flexible workflows with the Scholars network for last-mile reasoning and tuning of generative AI models.
Since 2025Reinforcement learning from human feedback, chain-of-thought reasoning, red teaming, prompt-and-response generation and model evaluation for large language and multimodal models.
Since 2023Image, video, 3D point cloud and sensor-fusion annotation for autonomous vehicles, robotics, geospatial mapping and agricultural technology such as crop and weed detection.
Since 2012Medical image annotation, radiology labeling, digital pathology and data de-identification for clinical and diagnostic AI, handled under strict quality and compliance controls.
Since 2016Where many providers lean on crowdsourcing, iMerit's Scholars network brings physicians, linguists and scientists to problems that need judgment, not just labor.
iMerit reports output accuracy above 98% - the number that matters most in a business where small error rates can quietly break a model.
Ango Hub ties annotation, model APIs, RLHF and analytics together, so the human work and the tooling operate as one pipeline instead of a hand-off.
Grown from the Anudip Foundation's skilling mission, iMerit's workforce is more than 50% women - a delivery model where social impact and quality reinforce each other.
iMerit works with Fortune 500 enterprises and leading AI labs. Reported clients include Microsoft, eBay, TripAdvisor and Autodesk, spanning autonomous vehicles, medical AI, agtech, geospatial services and financial services.
In the market for AI training data, iMerit sits alongside names like Scale AI, Appen, Sama, Labelbox, Surge AI and Kili Technology. Its differentiation is less about raw headcount and more about specialized, expert-driven data and a platform that keeps quality high across complex modalities.
The business is B2B: managed data services and platform engagements, delivered by a workforce of 10,000+ contributors in 60+ countries and 5,000+ full-time staff. Third-party estimates put annual revenue near $100 million.
A frontier model can be brilliant in a demo and unreliable in the field if its training and evaluation data is thin, biased or unlabeled for edge cases. iMerit exists to close that gap - supplying the labeled examples, human feedback and expert review that turn a capable model into a dependable one.
For customers, that means faster iteration, fewer failures on rare-but-critical cases, and a data pipeline they don't have to build in-house.
Figures compiled from public sources; reported totals range from ~$24M to ~$36M across three rounds. The pending EXL acquisition is valued at up to $310M.
Radha and Dipak Basu launch a nonprofit to bring digital skills to marginalized youth in India - the talent model that later feeds iMerit.
The Basus turn the skilling mission into a company delivering tech-enabled data services for machine learning.
Billionaires Michael Dell, Pierre Omidyar and Vinod Khosla back the company through their foundations and impact funds.
British International Investment leads a round to scale AI data operations.
iMerit marks a decade as a leader in AI data solutions with a global workforce and Fortune 500 clients.
Ango Hub adds the Deep Reasoning Lab, pairing the Scholars network with the platform for generative AI tuning.
EXL agrees to acquire iMerit for up to $310 million, with the deal expected to close in Q3 2026.
Radha Basu, Founder & CEO, spent 20 years at Hewlett-Packard, where she grew a software division into a $1.2 billion business, and later served as CEO of Support.com, which she took public.
Dipak Basu, Co-founder, partnered with Radha on both the Anudip Foundation and iMerit. Sudeep George, CTO, brings 20+ years in computer vision and co-founded Tonbo Imaging. DD Ganguly, a serial entrepreneur whose collaboration platform Dimdim was acquired by Salesforce, serves on the board driving corporate development.
We see EXL as an ideal leader in this defining moment for AI. We can build on our work with AI innovators and bring those insights to companies seeking to unlock their proprietary data.
iMerit provides AI data services - annotating, labeling, enriching and evaluating data - so companies can train, fine-tune and evaluate machine learning and generative AI models across text, images, video, 3D and medical data.
iMerit was founded in 2012 by Radha Basu (Founder & CEO) and co-founder Dipak Basu. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, with major operations in Kolkata and Bengaluru, India, and New Orleans.
Yes. In June 2026, enterprise-AI and analytics firm EXL (ExlService Holdings) announced a definitive agreement to acquire iMerit for up to $310 million, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
Its two proprietary assets are Ango Hub, a multimodal data-annotation and fine-tuning platform (including the Deep Reasoning Lab), and iMerit Scholars, a network of domain experts embedded in AI model development.
Fortune 500 companies and leading AI labs across autonomous vehicles, medical AI, agtech, geospatial and financial services; reported clients include Microsoft, eBay, TripAdvisor and Autodesk.