EXL aims to help clients deploy AI in real-world production environments, particularly in regulated industries, by integrating models with domain knowledge, context, and compliance.

The deal is valued up to $310 million, with $170 million paid upfront and up to $140 million in incentives and earnouts over two years.

Rohit Kapoor, EXL’s chairman and CEO, calls the acquisition a transformational pivot that deepens vertically specialized AI capabilities and expands reach into high-growth AI markets with emphasis on compliance and domain expertise.

EXL has completed its acquisition of iMerit to create an end-to-end enterprise AI platform, combining capabilities in AI model training, evaluation, and reinforcement learning.

The combined entity strengthens EXL’s strategy to leverage data and AI-driven approaches across industries such as insurance, healthcare, banking and capital markets, retail, and beyond.

The press materials frame the move as advancing from pilot to production-scale AI, building a more complete platform that covers data preparation, model configuration, training signals, evaluation, and deployment, while acknowledging scale and governance challenges.

iMerit specializes in high-context data creation and evaluation for training large language, vision, and multimodal models using a domain-specific expert network.

iMerit specializes in AI data services, fine-tuning, evaluation, reinforcement learning, and human feedback across sectors like high-tech, autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, and robotics.

iMerit founder and CEO Radha Ramaswami Basu joins EXL as Executive Vice President, Head of iMerit, and becomes a member of EXL’s executive committee, signaling leadership alignment with the expanded AI strategy and a focus on human-in-the-loop governance.

Basu will help shape EXL’s broader AI strategy, reinforcing the emphasis on trusted, accountable AI and industry-specific governance.

The combined organization intends to accelerate moving AI from pilot to production with reliability, accountability, and enterprise-scale deployment.

iMerit brings its Ango Hub platform and an expert network for multimodal data collaboration, enhancing data workflows, quality assurance, and model alignment for high-stakes AI applications.