EXL Acquires iMerit to Strengthen AI Training and Enterprise‑Scale Platforms

• Positions EXL to accelerate AI innovation in the enterprise with iMerit’s direct relationships with foundation model builders. 
• Deepens EXL’s vertically specialized end-to-end AI capabilities with iMerit’s model training, evaluation and reinforcement learning. 
• Expands EXL’s total addressable market across high-growth AI tech sectors, and multiplies the impact of iMerit on a broader enterprise audience

ExlService Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXLS), 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. The move strengthens EXL’s ability to help enterprises achieve measurable outcomes from AI, builds partnerships with leading foundation model builders and expands EXL’s reach into high-growth AI tech sectors.

"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,” said Rohit Kapoor, chairman and chief executive officer of EXL. “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.

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,” said Radha Ramaswami Basu, chief executive officer and founder of iMerit. “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.

These offerings strengthen EXL’s vertically integrated AI stack and its ability to build and fine-tune domain-specific language models. This 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.

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.

Transaction Details

The $310 million acquisition involves an upfront consideration of $170 million, with an additional $140 million in incentives and earnouts over two years contingent on meeting specified milestones. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, subject to customary closing conditions, including expiration or termination of the waiting period for applicable antitrust regulations.

About EXL

EXL (NASDAQ: EXLS) 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. For more information, visit www.exlservice.com.

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). Learn more at imerit.ai.

India’s Space Odyssey: From Lunar Triumphs to Human Spaceflight

India’s space journey over the past twelve years has transformed the nation into a global space power. Anchored in the vision of Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Viksit Bharat 2047, the country has achieved landmark milestones that blend scientific discovery, technological innovation, and strategic ambition.

From the Moon’s south pole to Mars orbit, and now toward human spaceflight and a national space station, India’s odyssey reflects confidence, self-reliance, and global credibility.

Defining Milestones in India’s Space Journey

• Chandrayaan‑3: First nation to soft‑land near the lunar south pole in 2023, confirming sulphur presence.
• Mangalyaan: Maiden Mars mission in 2014 succeeded on its first attempt, operating for over eight years.
• Aditya‑L1: India’s first solar observatory launched in 2023, contributing over 27 TB of solar research data.
• SPADEX: Autonomous space docking demonstrated in 2025, enabling future space station missions.
• Gaganyaan: India’s first human spaceflight programme, preparing to send astronauts into orbit by 2026–27.

Expanding Frontiers: Future Missions

• Chandrayaan‑4 & LUPEX: Planned for 2027–28, targeting lunar sample return and polar water exploration.
• Venus Orbiter Mission: Targeted for 2028, India’s Venus orbiter, named as Shukrayaan, is to study Venus’ geology, atmosphere, and solar interactions.
• Bharatiya Antariksh Station: India’s planned national space station, first module scheduled for 2028.

Private Sector and Commercialisation

India’s space ecosystem has shifted from government‑led programmes to a vibrant startup‑driven sector.

Year	Number of Startups	Investment
2014	1	Minimal
2026	400+	$500M+

Global Partnerships

• NASA: Joint NISAR mission for climate monitoring.
• CNES (France): TRISHNA satellite for thermal imaging and agriculture.
• JAXA (Japan): LUPEX lunar mission combining Indian lander and Japanese rover.
• ESA (Europe): Human spaceflight cooperation and joint lunar exploration.
• Russia: Long‑standing partnership supporting astronaut training and Gaganyaan.

Strategic Vision

India’s space odyssey is not just about exploration—it is about national development. Space technology now supports governance, disaster management, agriculture, healthcare, and connectivity. With reusable launch vehicles, indigenous microprocessors, and expanded infrastructure like the upcoming Kulasekarapattinam spaceport, India is building capacity for the next era of exploration.

Conclusion

India’s space programme has evolved from modest beginnings into a strategic national asset. With lunar, solar, and interplanetary missions, human spaceflight, and a planned space station, India is shaping the future of global exploration. Its blend of scientific ambition, private innovation, and international cooperation positions it as a rising leader in the space economy and a trusted partner in advancing humanity’s reach beyond Earth.

AI Boom Is Creating a ‘Human Skills Economy’ as Indian Firms Accelerate Adoption: IWG Study

• 90% of HR leaders warn innovation will slow without human traits and qualities
• 65% say AI can’t replace empathy; 53% say leadership remains uniquely human
• India has the world’s highest rate of AI adoption and one of its youngest workforces, making human skills the sharpest edge in a tightening jobs market

As Indian companies accelerate AI adoption and focus on technical upskilling, new research from International Workplace Group (IWG), the world’s leading platform for work, suggests that the next workforce challenge is building the human capabilities needed to use AI creatively and collaboratively.

According to IWG’s survey, the vast majority (90%) of HR leaders believe that failing to prioritize human capabilities is a risk to innovation. This finding reflects the emergence of a new “Human Skills Economy,” in which empathy, judgment, creativity, and leadership are core to business performance.

Rise of AI: A New Operating Reality for Work

AI is now deeply embedded in everyday workflows across organizations. IWG’s survey of hundreds of HR and recruitment leaders revealed that 73% of hybrid teams are already using tools like ChatGPT and 82% of organisations offer AI training. However, HR leaders say their readiness must accelerate to keep up, with fewer than half (45%) saying they are effectively closing the skills gap, suggesting a significant number of organisations are still lagging in effective AI use.

The findings are particularly relevant for India, where organisations are rapidly moving towards AI-enabled ways of working. India leads the world in workplace AI adoption, with 73% of workers using AI tools regularly, well ahead of the United States (45%) and the United Kingdom (29%).

According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index India findings, 93% of Indian business leaders intend to use AI agents to extend workforce capabilities within the next 12–18 months. This acceleration makes the development of human skills such as empathy, judgment, leadership and collaboration even more critical as companies redesign work around human-AI collaboration.

Humans + AI: The New Performance Model

As the labour market tightens - particularly at the entry level - employers are being forced to rethink what truly drives performance. Research from Randstad and the Institute of Student Employers shows that entry-level vacancies fell by 29% globally between January 2024 and the end of 2025, raising the bar for what differentiates candidates.

In India, that squeeze is already visible in the sector that defined its rise, with entry-level IT roles down an estimated 20 to 25% as automation absorbs routine work, even as the country fields one of the world’s youngest workforces.

While Gen Z brings a clear advantage in technological fluency, skills alone are no longer enough. The real differentiator is AI literacy: the ability to meaningfully apply AI tools in day-to-day work to unlock productivity and new ways of thinking.

In fact, research from International Workplace Group shows that nearly two-thirds of younger employees are already helping older colleagues adopt AI, from hands-on coaching to embedding tools into everyday workflows.

Against this backdrop, a new performance model is emerging, in which AI handles technical and repeatable tasks, and human capabilities define impact, leadership, and long-term value. HR leaders are clear about where humans remain essential:

• 65% say AI will never replicate human empathy
• 64% say it falls short in complex decision-making
• 53% say leadership will remain uniquely human

At the same time, boundaries are still evolving. Only 40% believe creativity will remain beyond AI’s reach, signalling a continued shift in how organisations define the line between human and machine capability.

Elements That Can’t Be Replicated: The Enduring Value of Human Skills

Even as automation expands, human skills are becoming the most durable source of competitive advantage. While 40% say missing AI or technology skills can disqualify candidates, two-thirds (66%) of HR leaders now say applicants’ ability to demonstrate human skills matters most in hiring, ranking above experience, technical skills, and education.

This shift is also reflected in evolving hiring signals: 45% of employers say they look for context around career moves and gaps to better understand a candidate’s overall experience and trajectory.

In India, industry body NASSCOM has noted that India has the capacity to reskill and develop 8 -10 million professionals in AI-related services by 2030. Deloitte and NASSCOM have also estimated that India’s AI talent demand could grow from 600,000–650,000 to more than 1.25 million between 2022 and 2027, while noting that a shortage of qualified professionals could slow innovation and growth. This makes the combination of AI fluency and human capabilities central to India’s future workforce readiness.

Further, more than half (55%) of HR leaders say hybrid workplaces are among the most effective settings for building empathy, judgment, and leadership skills, underscoring how hybrid work environments are seen as spaces where essential human traits like trust, mentorship, collaboration, and decision-making are actively developed and reinforced.

The Bottom Line

As AI reshapes work, organisations face a clear mandate. Success now depends not just on adopting new technologies, but also on strengthening human capabilities and helping technology and humans work as true teammates.

The future belongs to companies that integrate AI while intentionally building environments where human skills thrive.

Mark Dixon, CEO & Founder of International Workplace Group, commented: “Every major technological shift has redefined how we work — from the rise of the internet to email to smartphones. AI is no different, but what sets this moment apart is the speed and scale of change. Some roles will evolve or disappear, while entirely new ones will emerge.

As always, the organisations that resist transformation will fall behind. A key advantage will belong to those that combine AI’s efficiency with the uniquely human skills that drive innovation, leadership, and growth.”

Harsh Lambah, India Country Manager and VP Sales of South Asia at International Workplace Group, commented: “India is uniquely well positioned to lead the new 'Human skills economy' given that it has the world’s youngest workforce, and the fastest rate of AI adoption. The workplaces that will win in this new economy are the ones where people and AI grow together, and that is exactly what we are building across the country.”

Methodology:

The IWG Human Skills Economy Report was conducted in April 2026 by Mortar Research and targeted 510 U.S.-based HR, recruitment and hiring managers.

About International Workplace Group PLC

International Workplace Group (IWG) is the world’s leading platform for work enabling companies of all sizes to work more productively and profitably. We create personal, financial, and strategic value for the most exciting companies and well-known organizations on the planet as well as individuals and the next generation of industry leaders. All of them harness the power of IWG’s platform to increase their productivity, efficiency, agility, and market proximity.

International Workplace Group’s unrivalled network coverage includes more than 5,000 locations across 120 countries and 83% of Fortune 500 companies are amongst our growing customer base.

Our brands including Regus, Spaces, HQ and Signature serve millions of people, providing professional, inspiring and collaborative workspaces and all our digital services are available via the IWG app.

LTM Joins Athena, a Chainguard-led Industry Coalition to Help Secure Open Source Software in the AI Era

LTM, the Business Creativity partner to the world’s largest enterprises, has joined Athena, a new industry coalition led by Chainguard, focused on protecting open source software from the rising threat of AI-driven vulnerabilities.

Athena brings together leading organizations across the global software ecosystem to address an urgent challenge. As frontier AI models advance, they are increasingly capable of identifying novel vulnerabilities in open source software at machine speed, often faster than traditional disclosure and patching processes can respond. As AI accelerates both software development and the discovery of vulnerabilities, the window between a flaw being identified and being exploited has narrowed sharply. Athena is designed to close this gap through shared intelligence, coordinated action, and pre-disclosure remediation across the ecosystem.

The coalition supports vulnerability management end to end, from discovery and analysis to patching, layered mitigations, and upstream fixes. By enabling collaboration across the ecosystem, Athena helps improve the resilience of open source projects that organizations around the world depend on every day.

LTM's participation in Athena reflects its continued commitment to strengthening cybersecurity, enhancing software supply chain resilience, and contributing to industry-wide efforts that build trust in the digital ecosystem. As a global technology services partner to enterprise clients across industries, LTM brings deep engineering expertise and large-scale delivery experience to the coalition's collaborative remediation efforts.

"As AI reshapes both software development and the threat landscape, securing the open source foundations of the digital economy has become a shared responsibility. LTM is proud to join Athena and work alongside leading global organisations to advance a more secure, resilient, and trusted future for open source software," said Chandan Pani, Chief Information Security Officer, LTM.

"Athena is built on the belief that you can’t solve an ecosystem-wide problem with a single company. The open source ecosystem needs partners who can operate at global scale and act with speed and LTM brings both. Their participation in Athena strengthens our collective ability to stay ahead of AI-driven threats and ensures that remediation reaches the critical infrastructure, enterprises, and communities that depend on open source every day," said Naveen Sharma, Global Vice President, Partnerships, Chainguard.

By contributing to Athena, LTM joins a coordinated global effort to ensure that vulnerabilities identified by member organisations are remediated and pushed upstream, becoming fixes that the broader open source ecosystem can benefit from. To learn more about Athena, visit chainguard.dev/athena.

About LTM

LTM — a Larsen & Toubro Group Company — is an AI-centric global technology services company and the Business Creativity partner to the world’s largest enterprises. We bring human insights and intelligent systems together to help clients create greater value at the intersection of technology and domain expertise. Our capabilities span integrated operations, transformation, and business AI — enabling new ways of working, new productivity paradigms, and new roads to value. Together with over 87,000 employees across 40 countries and our global network of partners, LTM owns outcomes for our clients, helping them not just outperform the market, but Outcreate it. Read more at LTM.com.

The ePlane Company Completes Full‑Scale e200X eVTOL Assembly, Enters Ground Testing for Passenger, Cargo, and Air Ambulance Markets

• The completed aircraft now enters ground and flight testing, the phase that leads to certification and first operations.
• A single platform engineered for three markets, passenger air taxi, urban cargo and air ambulance, the e200X is backed by a board that includes Vishesh Rajaram (Speciale Invest), Eash Sundaram (JetBlue) and Aditya Ghosh (Homage, Akasa Air, formerly IndiGo)

The ePlane Company has completed assembly of its full-scale electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, the e200X, integrating the aircraft’s core subsystems into a single structure. The completed prototype, designated PT-01, moves the e200X from design and simulation into the physical testing phase that precedes flight. The aircraft is designed as one airframe serving three markets: a passenger air taxi, an urban cargo carrier, and an air ambulance.

A completed full-scale airframe is a decisive stage in any aircraft programme, because it establishes what simulation cannot. It validates that the design can be manufactured at full size, that the tooling and supply chain to build it are in place and functioning, and that the subsystems integrate physically into a single structure. It is the stage that separates designing an aircraft from being able to test one.

The e200X will now enter ground testing, in which the structure and onboard systems are subjected to aerodynamic and mechanical loads on specialised equipment at ePlane’s facility, followed by flight testing and the pursuit of Type Certification. Developing a full-scale eVTOL is among the most demanding challenges in contemporary aerospace, and only a small number of programmes worldwide have carried a design through to a complete, full-scale aircraft. With the e200X, ePlane is among them.

The e200X has been designed and assembled at ePlane’s own facilities, with its major systems, the propellers, the airframe structure, the landing gear and the battery pack, developed in-house rather than imported as finished assemblies. In a category where many developers rely on a global supply chain, that vertical integration gives ePlane unusual control over performance, cost and iteration speed.

The company has reached this stage on roughly 21 million US dollars raised to date, a fraction of what many international eVTOL programmes have consumed. Capital-efficient engineering is central to ePlane’s strategy.

Independent analysts value the global eVTOL market at roughly 1.3 billion US dollars in 2023 and project it to reach the 20-to-30-billion-dollar range by 2030, with the broader urban air mobility market on a similar trajectory.

Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, Founder of The ePlane Company said –

We set out to build an electric aircraft to a world-class benchmark, engineered and manufactured in depth in India for the World. We deliberately designed the e200X to be compact, because an aircraft that asks a city to rebuild itself around it will not solve the problem it was built to solve. The same airframe can move people as an air taxi, carry goods as a cargo aircraft, and save lives as an air ambulance, and it can do all three using the infrastructure cities already have. That combination of real capability and capital efficiency is how we intend to compete, and win, in markets around the world.”

ePlane’s ambition is matched by the people behind it. Its board brings together leaders who have built and scaled some of aviation’s most successful businesses: Vishesh Rajaram, Founder and Managing Director of lead investor Speciale Invest, Eash Sundaram, former Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Technology Officer at JetBlue and founder of JetBlue Technology Ventures; and Aditya Ghosh, who scaled IndiGo into India’s largest airline and went on to co-found Akasa Air; Founder Prof. Satya Chakravarthy and CFO Jayakrishnan R anchor the company’s deep-technology and engineering foundation.

The problems the e200X addresses are shared across the world’s major cities. The World Health Organization estimates that road traffic crashes kill about 1.19 million people globally each year, and survival from time-critical emergencies depends heavily on the golden hour, the window after a trauma or cardiac event in which intervention most determines the outcome.

India, one of the largest emerging markets for urban air mobility, illustrates the gap acutely, recording 172,890 road-accident deaths in 2023 and ambulance availability well below WHO norms. An aircraft that lifts a patient, a passenger or a payload above congestion addresses the single variable, time, that ground mobility cannot.

ePlane will unveil the completed e200X publicly in the coming weeks and then begin a ground testing campaign, followed by flight testing of the full-scale aircraft, building on the subscale prototypes it has already flown. It will pursue Type Certification with India’s DGCA, the first regulator to accept an eVTOL into its certification process, and then seek international validations to open export markets.

First operations will begin with early commercial applications and scale across the passenger, cargo and medical markets as certification milestones are met. The programme has already drawn international recognition: ePlane, incubated at IIT Madras, is among the Indian deep-technology ventures showcased at Bharat Innovates 2026, inaugurated in France in June 2026, and was recently featured in NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote in Taipei.