EXL to acquire AI training firm iMerit for $310Mn
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — EXLService Holdings has agreed to acquire iMerit, an AI model training and evaluation specialist, in a deal valued at up to $310 million. EXL will pay $170 million upfront, with an additional $140 million in earnings contingent on iMerit meeting specified performance milestones over two years.
According to a report from Business Standard, the transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, pending antitrust regulatory approval.
EXL employs more than 67,000 people across six continents and serves insurance, healthcare, banking, capital markets, and retail clients; iMerit specializes in AI fine-tuning, evaluation, and reinforcement learning for frontier model builders.
iMerit brings foundation model expertise to EXL’s AI stack
iMerit‘s two proprietary assets are Ango Hub, a multimodal data annotation platform, and the Scholars network — a global pool of physicians, scientists, engineers, and linguists for domain-specific AI work.
The deal gives EXL access to frontier model builder relationships — enabling domain-specific AI deployments in healthcare, insurance, and autonomous systems. EXL is betting that production-scale enterprise AI requires model training depth, not just automation — and that iMerit’s Scholars network and Ango Hub are that capability.
“The acquisition of iMerit strengthens EXL’s AI strategy and ability to help clients move from experimentation to production,” said Rohit Kapoor, Chairman and CEO of EXL.
EXL scales regulated-industry AI with iMerit acquisition
The $140 million earnout structure signals EXL’s expectation that the AI training market will expand as enterprise deployments mature beyond the pilot stage.
iMerit’s client base spans high-tech, autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, and robotics — sectors where expert-annotated domain-specific model training is a baseline expectation, not a differentiator.
For EXL, the iMerit deal completes a strategic vertical — from workflow BPO to AI deployment to the model training layer that underpins both.
“We can build on our work with AI innovators and bring those insights to companies seeking to unlock their proprietary data,” said Radha Ramaswami Basu, CEO and Founder of iMerit.
AI training data, evaluation, and reinforcement learning have become a fast-growing segment of the global outsourcing market, as foundation model builders require expert-annotated datasets and human feedback at scale.
EXL competes against Genpact, WNS, and Cognizant in data-driven AI services — the iMerit deal being among the sector’s most direct moves into foundation model training as a service line.
iMerit’s backing from Khosla Ventures and British International Investment underscores the prior institutional validation behind EXL’s $310 million market structure bet on AI training infrastructure.
