A recently opened technology centre in Coimbatore is improving driverless cars, tractors and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for global firms. Artificial intelligence (AI) data company iMerit Inc has been in the industry for almost a decade. Its automotive AI centre of excellence at Coimbatore employs more than 220 multi-sensor fusion experts, who create world models for autonomous vehicles, annotating images, lidar, and video to help vehicles recognise objects, navigate safely and get better at predicting pedestrian behaviour.
The centre has various jobs from research and development to data annotation. The company has hired or plans to hire machine learning engineers, lidar analysts, project managers who work across multiple centres, senior HR professionals, data annotation and labelling workers.
It has 12 AI centres — nine in India and one each in the US, Turkey and Bhutan. “This is the first centre in Tamil Nadu and I am excited about it,” says Radha Ramaswami Basu, chief executive and founder of the company.
Originally hailing from a village near Karur, she grew up in Chennai. “When I was studying at College of Engineering, Guindy, there were 2,800 guys and only 17 women in the whole university. That’s why I was excited to see a young woman from Karur applying for a job at the centre. That takes me right back to where I am from,” she says. Now 53% of her company’s employees are women. The company aims to work with young people from non-metros, especially young women.
Why choose Coimbatore? The city has an excellent talent pool with a mix of fresh and experienced talent, she says. “It has a good number of engineering and science colleges. The combination of expertise in automobile manufacturing and designing and high-quality education made it suitable for our aggressive growth plans. From my conversations with employees here, I feel Coimbatore’s work ethic is good and people are eager to learn. Also, industry-friendly policies and good infrastructure helped us open this centre in a very short time,” says Radha.
A lot of young people are willing to move to the city and there is no problem in finding talent, she says. The company hires young talent and provides four months training on its software platform and practice with tools and certifications at its Hubli centre. The company plans to double its headcount by the next financial year.
Radha says she wants to employ young people from lower income
backgrounds in tier-2 cities as a way of giving back to the community in
India. And, the resultant low attrition rate proves beneficial for the company.
She is no stranger to establishing new centres in emerging cities. After a stint in the US, in 1985 she founded the business operations of HP in India in Bengaluru. It is one of the first two multinational corporation facilities in Bengaluru and the first software centre for any MNC.
She plans to hire more specialists in the future. “Need for specialists and experts in data work is growing exponentially. That is why we have created the auto centre of excellence. The demand for AI data service will grow as applications get more complex,” she says. She plans to further expand the centre and add new businesses apart from its current verticals such as autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, and high tech.
