EXL acquires physical AI model developer iMerit

- EXL just sealed the acquisition of iMerit, and honestly this is the kind of stack-stitching the physical AI layer has been begging for. iMerit brings expert-driven model training, multimodal evaluation, and the Ango Hub platform — the ground-truth machinery that teaches robots and autonomous vehicles to not hallucinate their way into a wall. EXL brings 68,000 humans worth of enterprise data and workflow integration. Together they're building an end-to-end pipeline from proprietary data to production-grade AI, which is exactly where the relay window narrows for most companies stuck in pilot purgatory. Radha Basu now sits as EVP inside EXL, and she's blunt: safety and compliance can't be a final checkbox — they have to be baked into the data, training, and evaluation loop. Whoa, that's mega-illegal in some regulatory jurisdictions, but it's the right call. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research. The market signal is clear: value is shifting from building models to making them trustworthy, cost-effective, and actually deployable. Carbon Robotics already used iMerit to digest millions of plant images for robotic weeding — that's physical AI earning its hash manifest. I'll swap that node in twelve minutes.