ExlService Holdings, Inc., a global data and AI company, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire iMerit, a recognized leader in AI model training, evaluation and reinforcement learning. iMerit is focused on helping its clients train large language and multimodal models to improve accuracy, precision, and effectiveness. The acquisition, valued at up to $310 million in upfront and future consideration, is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.
EXL acquires iMerit for up to $310 million ($170M upfront + $140M incentives/earnouts).
iMerit provides model training, evaluation, and reinforcement learning for LLMs and multimodal models.
Ango platform enables chain-of-thought reasoning, red teaming, and multimodal evaluations.
Scholars network includes physicians, scientists, engineers, and linguists for human feedback workflows.
Expands EXL into high-growth AI sectors including autonomous systems and physical AI.
EXL has over 67,000 employees across six continents.
Rohit Kapoor, chairman and chief executive officer of EXL, stated: "As organizations reimagine their businesses with AI, success requires industry-specific data, rigorous evaluation and reinforcement learning to deliver reliable results in business-critical workflows. The acquisition of iMerit strengthens EXL's AI strategy and ability to help clients move from experimentation to production. By combining iMerit's capabilities with EXL's domain expertise and AI platforms, we are setting the standard for AI that is trusted, accountable and built to perform in the enterprise."
EXL will now be at the center of how next-gen AI is built, leveraging iMerit's client relationships with leading foundation model companies. EXL and its clients will benefit from early insight into how models are trained, fine-tuned and improved. This also positions EXL to help enterprises build fit-for-purpose small language models tailored to their data and workflows. iMerit enhances EXL's platform and human intelligence capabilities through its Ango platform and Scholars network. Ango powers sophisticated data interactions with GenAI models, enabling chain-of-thought reasoning, red teaming and multimodal evaluations. Scholars expands EXL's domain expertise through iMerit's global network of specialists, including physicians, scientists, engineers, linguists and other subject matter experts who support human intelligence-driven feedback workflows for reinforcement learning.
EXL will integrate Ango with its agentic platforms — including EXLerate.ai, EXLdata.ai, and EXLdecision.ai — to combine expert human judgment, model evaluation and enterprise-scale execution. Together, these capabilities create an end-to-end AI platform that helps enterprises accelerate the transition from pilot to production-scale AI. These offerings strengthen EXL's vertically integrated AI stack and its ability to build and fine-tune domain-specific language models, which is particularly critical for regulated industries such as healthcare, insurance, banking and capital markets where EXL is already a highly trusted data and AI partner.
Radha Ramaswami Basu, chief executive officer and founder of iMerit, commented: "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. Both companies share a belief that specialized high-quality data is the foundation of AI success. We are excited to multiply our impact through EXL's industry expertise, complementary technology and trusted enterprise relationships."
This acquisition also expands EXL into high-growth AI sectors, including high tech, mobility, autonomous systems and physical AI. iMerit's expertise across text, image, video, voice and LiDAR data creates a strong foundation for AI solutions powering robotics, autonomous vehicles and intelligent real-world environments.
About EXL
EXL is a global data and AI company that offers services and solutions to reinvent client business models, drive better outcomes and unlock growth with speed. EXL harnesses the power of data, AI and deep industry knowledge to transform businesses, including the world's leading corporations in industries including insurance, healthcare and life sciences, banking and capital markets, retail, communications and media and energy and infrastructure, among others. EXL was founded in 1999 with the core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and respect. We are headquartered in New York and have over 67,000 employees spanning six continents.
About iMerit
iMerit is a leader in AI fine tuning, evaluation, and reinforcement learning. iMerit helps frontier AI labs and enterprises build more accurate, reliable, and domain-aware models. iMerit delivers high-quality data across industries such as high-tech, autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, and robotics. Scholars, its global network of specialists, includes physicians, scientists, engineers, linguists, and other subject matter experts who power high-quality data creation, reasoning evaluation, model alignment, and human feedback workflows for next-generation AI systems. Its proprietary Ango Hub platform allows customers and experts to collaborate on complex multimodal data to generate highly curated and validated training artifacts for high-stakes models. iMerit is backed by Khosla Ventures, Omidyar Network, Dell Foundation and British International Investment (BII).
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