EXL acquires physical AI model developer iMerit

Radha Basu, EVP and head of iMerit (left), and Rohit Kapoor, CEO of EXL (right). Credit: Mark Liflander, EXL

The actions of physical AI, including robots, are only as good as the human expertise and data used to build the AI models that train them. ExlService Holdings Inc. this month completed its acquisition of iMerit Technology, a leader in AI model training, evaluation, and reinforcement learning.

Founded in 1999, EXL offers services and solutions to industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and capital markets, retail, communications and media, and energy and infrastructure. The New York-based company has about 68,000 employees worldwide.

Founded in 2012, iMerit provides data annotation for robotics, autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, and other high-tech industries. The San Jose, Calif.-based company said its subject-matter experts and proprietary Ango Hub platform enable customers “to collaborate on complex multimodal data to generate highly curated and validated training artifacts for high-stakes models.”

For instance, iMerit has partnered with Carbon Robotics to help digest millions of plant images needed to create an agricultural model for robotic weeding.

Radha Ramaswami Basu, founder and CEO of iMerit, has joined EXL as executive vice president and head of iMerit. She and Rohit Kapoor, chairman and CEO of EXL, replied to the following questions from The Robot Report about the acquisition.