Radha Basu, Founder and CEO of iMerit, a global AI data solutions company delivering high-quality data that powers machine learning and artificial intelligence applications for Fortune 500 companies in an exclusive interview with TimesTech Buzz. To now known, Ms Basu is a leading tech entrepreneur and a pioneer in the Indian software business. Under her leadership, iMerit has employed hundreds of skilled and marginalized women and youth in digital and data services worldwide. Here we bring her story and the company’s vision towards creating a digital-front strategy for e-commerce and financial services.
TimesTech: Small brief about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers?
Radha Basu: iMerit is a leading tech company that provides data labeling and enrichment services to create the highest quality data in the industry for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. iMerit’s highly skilled and full-time workforce transforms unstructured content, such as video, images, audio and text, to structured data for use within the most advanced algorithms in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our data labeling expertise and domain knowledge, combined with guided end-to-end service, ensure the highest quality data is achieved.
iMerit proves various AI-based solution services such as Computer vision services — which includes, but is not limited to, video and image annotation, Natural language processing services for transcription and validation, and content services for data enrichment, verification and extraction.
TimesTech: Brief us about your journey and the contributions towards the company and the industry.
Radha Basu: I founded iMerit in 2012. Today, iMerit has established a global presence, having 10 delivery centres in India, Bhutan and the United States. We have transformed iMerit, a company that started in a single room, to a level where it has established not only a global presence but has also become a global leader in AI solutions.
iMerit employs hundreds of skilled women and youth from underserved communities and is working to turn them into leaders of tomorrow. I have spent 20 years working for Hewlett Packard, assisting the electronic software division and founded operations in India. I also contributed to setting up the first software centre of a multinational company in Bangalore.
During the pandemic, we led a transformation within iMerit where a company that conducted 100% of its operations in-person moved to 100% remote operations. When many companies were laying off employees, iMerit was providing laptops, working with broadband providers to lay cables in India, upskilling its workforce, and hiring employees in India, Europe, and the US.
TimesTech: Tell us how your company is catering to the different industry sectors of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients?
Radha Basu: iMerit’s client base ranges across various sectors. In the financial sector, clients have benefited from our document automation tools which have helped specialists extract critical data from documents, including invoices, expense, credit, shipping and tax. Furthermore, our financial services team has helped clients extract, track and verify relevant details of funds such as asset classes and family details.
We have also been working with leading healthcare companies where we have helped them with digital pathology by annotating cells and tissues on Whole Slide Image (WSI), Our digital radiology teams have annotated tens of thousands of plain films, CTs and MRIs. Global leaders in robotics and endoscopy rely on iMerit’s expert computer vision data teams to drive innovation in instrument tracking, lesion detection, and phase identification.
We also work with geospatial tech, retail and autonomous mobility clients and governmental applications.
TimesTech: Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?
Radha Basu: iMerit’s focus is not just on one sector. Our end-to-end services are focused on providing solutions to various sectors such as autonomous mobility, geospatial technology, healthcare, financial services, retail, government and agriculture. For each we offer SME-led data solutions that can support AI development and deployment across the entire lifecycle. With our data solutions we are empowering businesses to solve complex problems with human-in-the-loop expertise and technology offerings.
TimesTech: How does your company’s rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful AI and machine learning models?
Radha Basu: iMerit’s teams have labeled hundreds of thousands of images, videos, and documents, and with this vast experience, our labelers are able to identify patterns in datasets and provide actionable insights to machine learning teams.
In the agricultural sector, our experts train computer vision models by annotating and labeling plants and crops, to automate repetitive tasks like harvesting, picking, pruning, seeding, and spraying, allowing farmers to focus more on improving overall production yields.
In the autonomous vehicle sector we have combined LiDAR and images from multiple angles captured from different sensors so that iMerit’s teams can help to reduce uncertainty in navigation. Furthermore, under our semantic segmentation solutions images are segmented into component parts, by the iMerit team, and then annotated. iMerit Computer Vision experts detect desired objects within images at the pixel level.
Our medical AI solution is another critical area where we help to spot specific types of abnormalities within diagnostic records. iMerit’s pathologist-led specialized teams annotate cells and tissues on Whole Slide Images (WSI) to help healthcare and pharmaceutical companies develop next generation products and treatments across a whole host of diseases. From information extraction to advanced NLP, iMerit’s experts in the medical lexicon dissect text and audio in medical records, digital documents, and clinical trial data to power robotic process automation, clinical decision support algorithms, and virtual assistants.
TimesTech: What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?
Radha Basu: iMerit offers expert-level data labeling with more than 98% accuracy, which is guaranteed through a thorough learning and development process and industry-dedicated staff. Having labeled hundreds of millions of images, iMerit’s end-to-end solution offers support all through the AI development cycle. We offer extensive solutions compared to our peers, including full-time in-house annotation workforce, industry subject matter experts, custom solutions, SOC2 Type II Compliance, in-house people training and expertise with edge scenarios.
TimesTech: Would you like to highlight a few use cases where analytics has benefitted the organisation tremendously?
Radha Basu: iMerit has built infrastructure to streamline reporting and analytics for each stage of the ML DataOps pipeline. iMerit Ground Control enables the collection of actionable analytics, progress metrics and insights that drive proactive project management. Detailed analytics are crucial to analyze the data labeling workflow performance and accuracy and make data-driven decisions. Real-time reporting enables dynamic troubleshooting and resource allocation. Root cause analysis and trend spotting over time also help in cost-saving over the long term.
TimesTech: Do you also feel that the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry? What are the skill sets that you specifically look for while hiring them at an initial stage?
Radha Basu: We at iMerit look to hire from diverse sections of the community to meet the growth requirements of the company. Regardless of role, we look for key skills such as coachability, agile learning ability, detail orientation and a hunger to succeed. Specific skill sets and expertise are crucial for more subject matter heavy roles. Once within the iMerit structure, employees go through the Learning & Development programs that have been developed over the years at iMerit. Our L&D technology platform helps to make learning agile and accessible.
TimesTech: Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.
Radha Basu: The COVID-19 pandemic was perhaps one of the biggest challenges that iMerit faced. Our U.S and Indian centres were abruptly shut-in late March 2020 because of the lockdown measures. Transitioning from in-person to a ‘work from home’ setup was a huge operational and logistical endeavour; it was a bit tougher for iMerit in particular because a number of our employees hail from underserved communities where high-speed internet was not available. This is where the bigger shift came in. We worked with ISPs to lay down cable lines so the internet can be delivered to these areas.
Our team worked tirelessly to get these cable lines laid and get broadband connections & dongles installed in over 1,500 houses. While it was challenging, the team efforts bore fruit and we were able to activate our teams for productive and seamless remorse work.
TimesTech: How do you see the company and the industry in the future? What are your growth plans for the next 12 months? What does your technology and business roadmap look for the rest of the year?
Radha Basu: As the AI market moves closer to the production & deployment of customized solutions, iMerit’s aim is to take into consideration the feedback that comes in through the data and provide an end-to-end data solution. iMerit will continue to make investments in technologies that will better enable AI data solutions across the entire lifecycle of products and services. We will work to improve our infrastructure and ability to scale alongside our clients.
Our recent ML DataOps summit has shown the importance of the services we provide. We will continue to work on solving complex challenges that occur in ML DataOps and invest in building a deeper understanding of tools that will enable value creation as data moves from an unstructured stage to a pre-ML stage, to production and deployment.
