Friday, October 23, 2015

iMerit Finds $3.5M For Crowdsourced Youth Labor

San Francisco- and Kolkata, India-based iMerit, which taps into the underprivileged youth workforce to help apply human effort to things like machine learning, feature tagging, photo identificaiton, facial recognition, and other areas, said it has raised $3.5M in a funding round. The funding came from The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Khosla Impact and Omidyar Network. The company said it has around 40,000 "marginalized youth"--particularly in India--who it uses for a variety of manual tasks, allowing even those without a formal education and skills to help deliver a wide range of service.