On-demand digital data services provider iMerit that skills and employs youth from under-privileged background is evaluating Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu as it considers expanding operations in the country.
“We want to [go] where young men and women are eager to develop digital skills,” founder and CEO Radha Basu said.
The more than four-year old for-profit social enterprise currently employs about 1,000 people — with 82% per cent from below poverty level families and having studied up to Standard 12. The firm has six centres in the country, in peri-urban areas of West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand, besides one centre in the U.S. There are plans to set up one more centre in Ranchi as well as in the U.S.
In Hyderabad for the ICT4D Conference recently, Ms. Basu said the company worked in the areas of financial technology, with technology companies, including those into self-driving cars, artificial intelligence as well as with e-commerce marketplaces. Product categorisation and image, data and sentiment analytics are areas it is focused on.
Rather than getting into IT BPO work, the company decided to leapfrog and go into online digital services. “Nobody believed that it was possible for these young people. But we work on projects like self-driving cars, we actually annotate the images. We have 250 people trained in image annotation
“It also applies to cancer cell images, use categorisation at the minute level... working with researchers in the U.S. and training the machine to detect cancer by looking at cells,” she said, adding the company is also training to chat bots and customer sentiment analysis.
Without divulging the revenue, she said the company is a profitable enterprise and looking to clock revenues of $100 million in four years and employ 10,000 people in five years. It had raised $4.5 million from three investors -- Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Khosla Impact -- and with much of that has not yet used it is not planning to raise more funds for now.
Noting that the company would continue to focus on working with youth and women from under-privileged and marginalised sections, she said one of the biggest plus points for iMerit is its low attrition rate, of four per cent. A low rate of attrition, she explains, meant that the same team does the work repeatedly. “They become real expert and their quality and thruput goes up,” says Ms.Basu, who previously was General Manager of Hewlett Packard’s $1.5 billion channel business.
