Radha Basu

Radha Basu is the Founder and CEO of iMerit, a global expert-data company powering the training, tuning, and evaluation of frontier AI models. Founded in February 2012, iMerit blends human expertise with automation to deliver high-precision data for the AI systems that cannot afford to be wrong — autonomous mobility, healthcare imaging, agentic AI, GenAI, and agriculture. The company today serves three of the Big Seven GenAI firms, eight top autonomous vehicle companies, three US federal agencies, and the leading AI research labs, and is backed by British International Investment (BII), Omidyar Network, Dell, and Khosla Ventures.The last twelve months have been defining. iMerit launched iMerit Scholars, a global network of subject-matter experts including physicists, surgeons, and linguists, positioning the company for the next leg of AI — the move from large foundation models toward AGI, where the marginal value of expert-grade human data outweighs the marginal value of scale. iMerit was named to the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies of America 2025, won the Economic Times Innovative Business of the Year 2025, the ET Edge Impactful CEO 2025, and the Persistent Systems "She Shapes AI" Award at the Indiaspora Global AI Summit 2026. iMerit and Segmed.ai, with Advocate Health, recently released the largest open-source annotated breast tomosynthesis dataset to date — 558 patients — a meaningful contribution to medical AI research.Radha is one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs of her generation. She started HP's operations in India while running their $1.2 billion electronic software division, and was the first woman of Asian origin to take a company public on NASDAQ with SupportSoft (where she served as Chairman and CEO from 1999 to 2007, leading both the IPO and secondary offering). She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and completed Stanford GSB's Executive Management Program. She is the Dean's Professor and Director of the Frugal Innovation Lab at Santa Clara University, has guest-lectured at MIT Sloan and London Business School, and co-founded the Anudip Foundation, one of India's largest livelihood tech-skills NGOs.Radha earns her place on the AIM Next 15 AI CEOs in America 2026 for building one of the most consequential and ethically anchored AI companies in the world — and for positioning iMerit at the precise inflection point the industry is now arriving at. As frontier AI moves from scaling pre-training data to scaling expert evaluation, post-training, and human-in-the-loop refinement, iMerit's bet — that domain expertise is the next bottleneck — looks increasingly definitional for the AGI transition. That she has built this profitably, with a workforce that is 50% women, and across a global delivery footprint spanning the Global South, is not incidental to the story. It is the story.