Dell Foundation, Khosla Impact and Omidyar Network investing in creating technology opportunities for marginalized youth, with a focus on young women
SAN FRANCISCO and KOLKATA, India, Oct. 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- iMerit, a digital services company which also delivers social impact, today announced that it has raised $3.5 million to recruit and develop underprivileged youth, especially young women, to deliver advanced digital services. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Khosla Impact and Omidyar Network are providing the investment on the heels of iMerit having created digital service jobs for the most promising of the 40,000 marginalized youth trained along with its partner foundation. Clients, which include Microsoft, eBay, Catholic Relief Services and Crowdflower, use iMerit for a diverse range of projects including machine learning, mobile and Cloud support, and big data analytics. iMerit's core strength is its ability to identify human potential in workers without formal education and upskill these workers to deliver best-in-class accuracy for clients.
CEO Radha Basu said: "This new funding will help iMerit expand our digital talent pool and grow our blue chip client base, while also helping the neediest and most promising young people. We plan to expand globally and employ 6,000 workers from marginalized communities, across 15 centers over the next five years."
iMerit is unique in its market-aligned approach, where youth are continuously upskilled to meet changing client needs. Every project comes with new skills. In machine learning projects, for example, the iMerit teams are trained in ground truth annotation techniques, facial recognition technology, photo identification, human anatomy and feature tagging, and more. These skills equip them to create large 2D and 3D data sets, which can then be used to train and test computer vision algorithms. The company consistently delivers its services at above 95% customer satisfaction.
"Khosla Impact invested in iMerit because they can play a transformative role in the future of work. Radha and her team are building the iMerit platform to prepare millions of young people for digital jobs over the next decade," said Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures.
Youth unemployment is a major global problem. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the official unemployment rate for whites aged between 16 to 19 is 15.7 percent, for Hispanics it is 20.8 percent and for African-Americans 31.8 percent. With 65 percent of the population below the age of 35, India has been hit particularly hard by youth unemployment, with young women being impacted the most. iMerit is harnessing the changing needs of the $55 billion global Internet services industry to address these issues.
About iMerit
iMerit is the world's first Human-Empowered Computing company created to deliver digital services, while effecting positive social and economic change. iMerit is led by CEO Radha Basu, who led the IPO of SupportSoft and who was General Manager of Hewlett Packard's $1.2 billion enterprise solutions business. iMerit is a privately-held international company with operations in Palo Alto, CA and Kolkata, India. The company is funded by leading Silicon Valley investors including Omidyar Network (led by founders of eBay), Khosla Impact, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and the World Bank.
More information about iMerit can be found at: www.imerit.net.
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