Meta Description: Compare the top data annotation companies in India for 2027, with delivery cities, certifications, workforce size and core services for buyers who need scale.
India has become one of the main places where the world’s AI training data gets made. Labeling teams in Kolkata, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Noida and a long list of smaller cities now draw bounding boxes for self-driving programs, segment medical scans, transcribe speech in regional languages and rank chatbot answers for reinforcement learning. For buyers, the appeal is a familiar mix: a large English-speaking graduate workforce, mature delivery practices carried over from the outsourcing industry, and labor costs well below those of the US or Western Europe.
That mix also makes the market crowded. Some vendors are Indian companies through and through, while others are US-registered firms whose annotators sit almost entirely in India. Some grew out of decades of back-office work, and a few were set up specifically to move digital income into rural and low-income communities. If you are also weighing general outsourcing partners, our list of the top BPO companies in India covers the wider services market, and our global ranking of data annotation and labeling companies shows how Indian vendors compare with providers elsewhere.
This list covers ten companies that are either headquartered in India or use India as their primary delivery base, and we state which applies to each. Every fact below comes from the company’s own website or from news coverage we checked in October 2026. We favored vendors with verifiable delivery locations, published security credentials and a clear specialism, and we chose a mix that covers computer vision, natural language and speech, medical data, large language model (LLM) training data and impact sourcing.
Data Annotation Companies In India At A Glance
Company
Headquarters
Best For
Core Services
iMerit
Kolkata (India base; part of EXL since 2026)
Enterprise and frontier AI programs needing domain experts
Computer vision, LiDAR, medical imaging, RLHF, model evaluation, Ango Hub platform
NextWealth
Bengaluru
Large managed teams delivered from Tier-2 cities
Computer vision, generative AI data, trust and safety, catalog services
Objectways
Karur, Coimbatore and Chennai delivery (US offices in Arizona)
Security-sensitive work at scale
Multimodal annotation, LLM fine-tuning data, content moderation, physical AI data
Shaip
Ahmedabad operations (US HQ in New York)
Speech and healthcare datasets
Data collection, speech data, medical annotation, LLM data, licensed datasets
Cogito Tech
Noida delivery (US office in New York)
Generative AI and medical annotation
RLHF, red teaming, computer vision, NLP, medical annotation, content moderation
Karya
Bengaluru
Ethically sourced Indian language data
Speech and text data collection, transcription, evaluation benchmarks
HabileData
Ahmedabad
Cost-focused image, video and text labeling
Image, video and text annotation, semantic segmentation, 3D point cloud
CapeStart
Nagercoil and Chennai delivery (US HQ in Cambridge, MA)
Life sciences and medical data projects
AI data services, medical image annotation, literature review, AI engineering
Infolks
Mannarkkad, Palakkad district
Autonomous vehicle and image labeling
Image, video, LiDAR, text and audio annotation, generative AI labeling
iMerit is the best-known name in Indian data annotation, and the last few months have changed its ownership. In June 2026, EXL announced a definitive agreement to buy iMerit for up to $310 million, made up of $170 million upfront and up to $140 million in incentives and earnouts over two years, according to EXL’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. EXL announced completion of the deal on August 3, 2026. Founder and CEO Radha Ramaswami Basu has joined EXL as Executive Vice President and Head of iMerit, and the brand continues to operate under its own name at imerit.ai. Before the sale, iMerit was backed by Khosla Ventures, Omidyar Network, the Dell Foundation and British International Investment.
Trade press has long described the company as Kolkata-based, and British International Investment has reported a team of about 2,800 people, roughly 90% of them in India and more than half of them women. iMerit was set up as a for-profit social enterprise, and Frontier Enterprise reported that more than 80% of its workforce comes from low-income families. It has also opened a delivery centre in Thimphu, Bhutan.
Its service range covers image, video, LiDAR and 3D point cloud annotation, sensor fusion, medical imaging and digital pathology, text and audio work, and generative AI services such as RLHF, model evaluation, chain-of-thought reasoning and red teaming. Its Ango Hub platform is where customers and experts work on the data together, and its Scholars network lists more than 25,000 domain experts. iMerit’s site lists SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA and TISAX compliance, which matters for automotive buyers.
2. NextWealth — 5,000+ Staff Across 11 Tier-2 Cities
NextWealth was founded in Bengaluru in 2009 by Dr. Sridhar Mitta, Anand Talwai, Mythily Ramesh and S.R. Gopalan, and India is its home base, with a US office in Frisco, Texas. Its model is built around smaller cities rather than metro tech hubs. The company lists 11 delivery centres in Mallasamudram, Chittoor, Hubballi, Bhilai, Mysore, Vellore, Puducherry, Salem, Jaipur, Udaipur and Kumbakonam, and says 60% of its more than 5,000 employees are women.
NextWealth reports more than one billion data transactions, more than 40 live projects and more than ten Fortune 500 clients.
The service catalog is broad. On the computer vision side it covers image, video and LiDAR annotation, semantic segmentation, bounding boxes and polygons. For generative AI it lists RLHF, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), prompt evaluation and red teaming. It also runs trust and safety work such as content moderation, KYC verification and fraud prevention, plus marketplace services such as catalog enrichment and search relevance, and human-in-the-loop QA for live AI systems. NextWealth lists ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2022, PCI DSS v4.0, HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR, one of the fuller compliance sets on this list.
3. Objectways — 2,200+ Annotators In Tamil Nadu With SOC 2 Type II
Objectways was founded in the US in August 2018 by Founder and CEO Ravishankar Rajalingam. Its US offices are in Phoenix, Mesa and Scottsdale, Arizona, but its delivery base is India: the company runs centres in Karur, Coimbatore and Chennai in Tamil Nadu. It reports more than 2,200 trained annotators and AI specialists and says it is on track to grow past 3,000 employees.
The company frames its hiring as job creation in underserved communities. It reports that 80% of its staff are first-generation college graduates and that average household income rose more than 60% after joining.
Security is a strong point. Objectways lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27701:2019, TPN Gold, HIPAA and GDPR. TPN Gold is a content security assessment from the media and entertainment industry, which is useful if your data includes unreleased video. Services cover text, image, audio, video and LiDAR annotation, data collection, content moderation, and generative AI work such as feedback and fine-tuning data for LLMs. It has also added physical AI datasets, including egocentric, depth and teleoperation data for robotics. Objectways is an AWS partner with a dedicated Amazon SageMaker partner page, and it reports more than 500 million labels created for more than 100 customers.
4. Shaip — Speech And Healthcare Data From Ahmedabad
Shaip lists its headquarters in New York and its primary operations in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, at the Atal-Kalam Research Park near Gujarat University. In February 2026 it became part of Ubiquity Global Services, a New York-based provider of digital operations and customer experience services, which has delivery sites across the Americas, the Philippines, the UK and Ghana. Shaip describes itself as operational since 2019, when it began with a project for a Fortune 10 company.
Shaip is strongest in speech and healthcare data. Its speech catalog covers more than 65 languages and more than 70,000 hours of speech, including Indian language datasets and conversational AI localization. On the medical side it offers medical data annotation and catalog data such as physician dictation, transcribed records and imaging, and it cites 250,000 audio hours and 30 million patient notes in its medical catalog. A testimonial on its site from a Google engineering lead describes a collaboration of more than two years on healthcare speech APIs.
Beyond collection, Shaip covers annotation and labeling, supervised fine-tuning data, RLHF and preference data, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) support, multimodal data and expert model evaluation. It also sells off-the-shelf datasets and licenses, which can cut weeks from a project if an existing dataset fits. Shaip reports a team of more than 150 plus more than 10,000 in-house experts, 12 delivery centres across four continents and more than 100 customers. It lists ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA and GDPR. Shaip suits buyers who need data sourced as well as labeled, especially audio in Indian and other languages.
5. Cogito Tech — RLHF And Medical Annotation From Noida
Cogito Tech is registered as Cogito Tech LLC with a US office in Levittown, New York, while its delivery centres are in India: its contact page lists three sites in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, in Sector 2 and Sector 59. The company says its roots go back to 2011, so it has worked through several generations of AI data demand, from early computer vision projects to current generative AI work.
Its generative AI practice is a main focus. Cogito lists RLHF, red teaming, fine-tuning, prompt and response generation and LLM support, along with agentic AI and automatic speech recognition (ASR) data. It also offers a traceability service it calls DataSum. The medical practice is equally detailed, covering digital radiology and pathology, dental AI, cardiac imaging, surgical and ophthalmology annotation, medical transcription and support for FDA compliance.
The rest of the catalog covers image, video and 3D point cloud annotation, AI-assisted labeling, text classification, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, chatbot training data, audio and video transcription, content moderation and document processing with OCR. Industries served include autonomous vehicles, financial services, retail, geospatial and robotics. Cogito’s site lists GDPR, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, SOC 2, CCPA and HIPAA. Client testimonials on the site report more than 95% IoU accuracy and QA pass rates above 98% on specific projects. Those figures come from individual projects, so ask for benchmarks on work similar to yours.
6. Karya — Ethical Speech Data In 22 Indian Languages
Karya is based in Bengaluru and is the impact sourcing choice on this list. TIME reported in 2023 that it launched in 2021 as a nonprofit calling itself “the world’s first ethical data company,” co-founded by CEO Manu Chopra, CTO Vivek Seshadri and Safiya Husain. According to that report, a US nonprofit controls two Indian entities, one nonprofit and one for-profit, and the for-profit donates its profits to the nonprofit after paying workers. Karya’s current site names DAIA Tech Pvt. Ltd. as the operating entity, and Chopra was named to the TIME100 list of influential people in AI.
The pay model sets Karya apart. TIME reported a minimum of $5 per hour, nearly 20 times the Indian minimum wage, plus a 50% bonus once clips are validated. Workers also receive royalties when their data is resold, and Karya had paid $116,000 in royalties to about 4,000 workers at the time of that report. About 30,000 rural workers had been paid a combined 65 million rupees. These figures date from 2023, so ask Karya for current numbers.
Karya’s work centers on Indian languages that are underrepresented in AI. Its site lists conversational speech datasets across all 22 official Indian languages, transcription, localized translation and multimodal dataset creation, along with egocentric datasets for physical AI. It also publishes Samiksha, an evaluation benchmark covering six Indian languages, 17 models and four domains. Reported clients and partners include Microsoft, the Gates Foundation, MIT and Stanford, and Google has used Karya to gather speech data across 85 Indian districts. Karya is best suited to speech and language data rather than high-volume image labeling.
7. HabileData — Ahmedabad Operation Backed By 30+ Years In BPO
HabileData is headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, at Hitech House in the Gurukul area, and India is both its home and its delivery base. The brand grew out of long-running back-office and data processing work. It cites more than 30 years of industry experience, and its site names HitechDigital Solutions LLP in its legal disclaimer. That history is visible in the numbers it reports: more than 1,200 BPO professionals, more than 2,000 clients and more than 6,500 completed projects.
For annotation buyers, HabileData offers image annotation and labeling, text annotation, video annotation, semantic segmentation, 3D point cloud annotation and multimodal annotation. Its broader data services, such as data cleansing and enrichment, can help if your raw data needs work before labeling starts. One case study on its site describes cleansing more than 17 million records a year for a US hospitality client.
HabileData is a practical choice for teams that want steady, cost-conscious labeling for standard computer vision and text tasks, managed by a company with decades of outsourcing process behind it. Its site refers to ISO practices and shows an ISO badge without naming the standard, so ask for the specific certificates, such as ISO 27001, before sending sensitive data. It is less specialized in generative AI and expert-level medical work than some vendors higher on this list.
8. CapeStart — Life Sciences Annotation From Nagercoil
CapeStart’s headquarters is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but its delivery work runs from India: it lists two centres in Nagercoil, a city near the southern tip of Tamil Nadu, and a third in Chennai. The company reports more than 600 AI engineers, data scientists and domain experts, more than 100 clients, more than 250 projects delivered and more than 13 years in business.
CapeStart is more than an annotation shop. Its AI data services cover labeling across text, image, audio and video, including medical image annotation, and it pairs that with AI consulting, model integration, MLOps and software engineering. Its clearest specialty is pharma and life sciences. It offers evidence synthesis, systematic literature review through its MadeAi product, pharmacovigilance and health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) support. For medical technology clients it lists clinical evaluation report (CER) and 510(k) support, EU MDR alignment and post-market surveillance work.
That combination suits life sciences companies that need annotated data and the regulatory and research context around it from the same partner. CapeStart’s site shows compliance badges including HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA and COBIT 5, along with AWS Partner and AICPA logos, and it lists Stevie award wins. Ask for audit reports where your project needs them. Buyers focused on medical imaging should also see our list of medical data annotation companies.
9. Infolks — Autonomous Vehicle Labeling From Rural Kerala
Infolks is headquartered at Infolks Tower in Mannarkkad, in the Palakkad district of Kerala, which makes it one of the few annotation companies based in a small Indian town rather than a city. Gulf News reported in 2019 that founder, MD and CEO Mujeeb Kolasseri set up the company after a German client promised steady projects in 2016. At the time it employed about 250 people, around 80% of them recent graduates, and most came from Mannarkkad and the rest of Palakkad district. The same report named Daimler among its clients and said the company planned a building for 1,000 staff.
Infolks built its business on image annotation for autonomous vehicles, labeling the road scenes that cameras and sensors capture. It has since added video, text, audio and LiDAR annotation, product categorization, NLP labeling, generative AI labeling across images, video, audio, text and tabular data, and AR and VR data labeling. Its site lists 14 industries it serves, including automotive, retail, agriculture, livestock, security and surveillance, sports, waste management, logistics, geospatial and healthcare.
The draw for buyers is a fully managed, human-driven labeling service with a rural cost base and long experience in automotive data. Infolks does not list specific security certifications on its homepage, although it links to data security and quality pages, so ask about controls during due diligence. Its 2019 headcount figures are also dated. Infolks fits best for computer vision programs that need consistent, long-running teams rather than domain experts.
10. Labellerr — Annotation Platform Paired With A Managed Labeling Service
Labellerr is run by Tensor Matics, Inc., which lists its headquarters in San Francisco and a registered office in Delaware. Its Indian base is an office at the Innovation Mission Punjab building in Aerocity, Chandigarh, and it lists Noida and Chandigarh phone lines. It is the only company on this list that leads with software. Labellerr is mainly a data annotation platform, with managed annotation services sold alongside it.
The platform supports images, video, PDFs, text and audio, plus DICOM tools for medical imaging. It offers prompt-based, model-assisted and active-learning labeling, native support for Meta’s Segment Anything models (SAM, SAM 2 and SAM 3), upload of pre-annotations for review, and project analytics. It exports to CSV, JSON, COCO, Pascal VOC and custom formats and connects to AWS, GCP and Azure storage. Customers can keep data in their own cloud through signed URLs. Labellerr lists SOC 2 Type II certification, TLS 1.2+ encryption in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest.
Labellerr is also the only company here that publishes prices. Its pricing page lists a free Researcher plan with 2,500 data credits and one seat, a Pro plan at $9,999 per year with 100,000 credits, and custom Enterprise pricing. The same page lists annotation services starting at $6 per hour. Some of the page’s own figures conflict, so confirm the current terms with sales. Labellerr suits teams that want to run labeling in their own tool and add an Indian workforce when volume rises. For other software options, see our list of AI data annotation platforms.
How To Choose A Data Annotation Company In India
Is The Company Indian, Or Just Delivering From India?
Many vendors on this list are registered in the US while their annotators work in India. Neither setup is better in itself, but it affects contracts, data residency and which jurisdiction applies if something goes wrong. A US-registered vendor may make procurement easier for American buyers, while an India-headquartered firm may give you more direct access to delivery leadership. Ask where your data will be stored and processed, which legal entity signs the contract, and whether any work is subcontracted to other countries or vendors.
Which Certifications Actually Cover Your Data?
Badges on a homepage are a starting point, not proof. Ask for the current SOC 2 Type II report or ISO 27001 certificate and check its scope: which sites and services it covers, and when it expires. A certificate that covers a head office in the US may not cover a delivery floor in Tamil Nadu. For health data, ask how the vendor supports HIPAA in practice, including access controls, device policies and whether annotators can work remotely. For automotive data, TISAX is worth asking about.
Do They Have Real Expertise In Your Data Type?
General labeling teams handle bounding boxes and simple classification well. Medical imaging, legal documents, Indian language speech and LLM preference data need trained specialists, and the price and quality gap between generalists and specialists is large. Ask who will do the work, what training they receive and how many projects of your type the vendor has delivered. If you are buying LLM training data, our list of RLHF and LLM training data companies covers vendors focused on that work.
How Is Quality Measured And Reported?
Accuracy claims of 95% or 99% mean little until you know how they are calculated. Agree on the metric before work starts, whether that is IoU for segmentation, inter-annotator agreement for text or a QA pass rate on a sampled set. Ask how many review layers each item goes through, how errors are fed back to annotators and what happens when a batch fails. Most serious vendors will run a paid or free pilot on a few thousand items, and that pilot is the best evidence you will get.
What Does Pricing Actually Include?
Indian vendors usually price per hour, per task or per finished item, and the cheapest headline rate can end up costing more if it excludes QA, project management or rework. Labellerr is the only company here that publishes an annotation rate, and most others quote per project. Ask each shortlisted vendor to price the same pilot so you can compare like for like, and check whether tooling licences, data transfer and onboarding are billed separately.
Conclusion
India offers buyers more choice in data annotation than almost any other market, from iMerit’s expert-led programs, now backed by EXL, to NextWealth’s and Objectways’ large teams in smaller cities, Karya’s ethically sourced language data and Labellerr’s platform-plus-workforce model. The right partner depends less on headline scale than on fit. Match each vendor’s specialism, delivery location and security credentials to the data you actually need labeled.
Shortlist three vendors whose specialisms match your project, request their audit reports, and run the same pilot with each before signing a long-term contract.
