IndiVillage named Impact Sourcing Champion in IAOP’s Global Index

Social enterprise was named as a ‘Company to Watch’ based on its contribution to community outreach in India

Bangalore, 17th August, 2020: IndiVillage, a sustainable social enterprise powering cutting edge solutions for some of the world’s leading companies, has been named in a global index of leaders in impact sourcing. The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’ (IAOP) Impact Sourcing Champions Index, a list created in partnership with Global Mentorship Initiative (GMI), features organisations that have used impact sourcing to make a profound contribution to disadvantaged communities with limited prospects. 

IndiVillage, which was founded ten years ago, offers high-quality image and data annotation, natural language processing and content optimization for some of the world’s leading Technology & Ecommerce companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion and Mercato. The company provides stable and lucrative jobs to over 300 people in rural India with profits reinvested in the community to further education, healthcare, and access to clean drinking water. IndiVillage featured in the index further to an online submission, which was reviewed by IAOP’s CSR and Social Impact Committee.

Recognising this distinction as acknowledgement of IndiVillage’s substantial impact, CEO Smita Malipatil said, “I am immensely proud of every single employee at IndiVillage and the work we do. India is a vast and fragmented country bursting with potential, but it is also affected by staggering income inequality often exacerbated by the gap between its rural and urban regions. This recognition from IAOP validates our ‘Business for Good’ mission which we are looking to scale significantly across the country. By enabling people from some of the remotest parts of the country to work with global leaders on their technology offerings, we have proven that community development and commercial growth can go hand in hand. I wholeheartedly believe that our model will be a catalyst for change and inspire several other organisations to follow suit.”

The philosophy of impact sourcing ensures that companies can combine commerce, corporate responsibility, and commitment to communities. By furthering progressive employment in rural areas, IndiVillage has impacted over 35,000 people annually and continues to expand at a rapid pace, marking the company as a worthy inclusion and one set for greater honours.

“Doing well by doing good is now more important than ever. Ensuring that disadvantaged populations have access to formal employment and decent work, allowing them to improve their conditions, acquire a career, and thus lift themselves, their families, and their communities out of poverty are the most suitable means to economic growth. I am proud of the work undertaken by IndiVillage and the other organisations who’ve made it to IAOP’s Impact Sourcing Champions Index,” said IAOP CEO Debi Hamill.

About IndiVillage

IndiVillage offers cutting edge solutions including image and data annotation, natural language processing and content optimization for some of the world’s leading Technology & Ecommerce companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion and Mercato. It follows a “profit-for-all” model, reinvesting profits into the rural communities where its employees live. The company’s services are delivered out of offices in Yemmiganur, AP, and Raichur, Karnataka in South India. Over the last decade, IndiVillage has impacted over 35,000 lives through sustainable community development initiatives such as access to clean drinking water, improved livelihoods, better healthcare, and standardized education. IndiVillage is among a select set of six Indian companies that have obtained the B Corp certification, which signals that the organization’s operations and business model meet the highest global standards of verified performance on social and environmental dimensions.

About IAOP

IAOP is the global association that brings together customers, providers, and advisors in a collaborative, knowledge-based environment that promotes professional and organizational development, recognition, certification, and excellence to improve business service models and outcomes. IAOP connects you and your organization to our growing global community and to the resources you need to be successful. For more information, visit www.IAOP.org .

About the Impact Sourcing Champions Index in partnership with the Global Mentorship Initiative

This is IAOP’s inaugural list of companies that have distinguished themselves as trailblazers in Impact Sourcing. To be included in the index, companies submitted an online application, which was then reviewed by IAOP’s Social Impact Committee. The index is showcased on IAOP’s website, in PULSE Magazine and in the October 2020 “Change the World” issue of FORTUNE Magazine®.




Inkers Announces Partnership with IndiVillage In Bid to Transform Road Safety

Bangalore, 21 September 2020: Inkers, a Bengaluru-based startup backed by Sachin and Binny Bansal among other investors, has signed a deal with IndiVillage to deliver a cutting-edge road safety solution for a leading global automobile player. The partnership will see IndiVillage provide data analytics support to Inkers’ breakthrough machine vision offering for the automotive industry.

Inkers was founded by Rohan Shravan and Manish Giri, IIT Kharagpur alumni and tech enthusiasts, to deliver intelligent video analytics solutions like visual workflow automation, object detection, tracking, and facial recognition. At the heart of its business is InkVision – an AI operating system delivering metadata for all camera-recognised images including faces and objects, provided through boxed and turnkey solutions. The company’s value proposition has quickly caught the attention of the industry, earning it no fewer than 45 clients including industry leaders such as Airbus, Zeiss, Nvidia, Levi’s, Britannia and Landmark Group.

The partnership with IndiVillage will help Inkers deliver a breakthrough solution for an automobile giant with safety at the forefront of its business. The implementation will use thermal imaging in all of the manufacturer’s vehicles to detect any driver impairments by measuring changes in their blood sugar up to 30% in addition to 28 other potential diseases. Additionally, the project includes a video solution for facial recognition designed to highlight any structural anomalies. Already in use extensively in healthcare, the use of thermal imaging in consumer automobiles is a landmark industry event and could signal a new era in automobile safety.

Best-in-class data analytics are crucial to the implementation, making it imperative to find a robust analytics partner. Speaking about the importance of the partnership, Rohan Shravan, Founder at Inkers Technology, said, “Our goal was to transform the problems of visual perception using industry-leading AI and ML. Our solutions help companies make sense of what machines are seeing so they can deliver powerful, efficient, and safe solutions at scale. This automotive project could have an impact on millions of lives, and we are committed to excellence at every step of execution. IndiVillage’s strong technical capabilities mean that they are great at helping us analyse thermal data sets. The company is also extremely proactive and offers outstanding quality, which allows us to focus on creating machine vision modules of the future. The fact that they combine this capability with doing business for good is the icing on the cake.”

IndiVillage’s offers services such as image and data annotation, natural language processing, and content optimisation to Technology and e-commerce companies. The company’s ‘Business for Good’ philosophy means that the company hires all employees from an otherwise marginalised rural populace and reinvests all profits within the community to further education, healthcare, and access to clean drinking water.

Commenting on the partnership with Inkers, IndiVillage CEO, Smita Malipatil said, “We have always maintained that profits, purpose, and impact go hand in hand. Working with a startup like Inkers, backed by investors like Sachin and Binny Bansal, is a shot in the arm for our operations, and validates the quality of our services and solution. We firmly believe that Inkers will transform machine vision, globally, and are proud to partner with them in this journey.”

IndiVillage was recently named in The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) Impact Sourcing Champions Index of global leaders in impact sourcing, which features organisations that have used impact sourcing to make a profound contribution to disadvantaged communities with limited prospects. 

IndiVillage is also the first Indian ITeS company to be certified as a B-Corp organization, one that combines purpose and profit with distinction. Certified B Corporations are legally mandated to factor in a broader ecosystem, including employees, clients, suppliers, the community, and the environment in all decision-making processes.

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About Inkers – TO BE RECEIVED FROM Inkers

About IndiVillage

IndiVillage offers cutting edge solutions, including image and data annotation, natural language processing, and content optimization for some of the world’s leading technology and e-commerce companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion, Swiggy, and Mercato. It follows a “profit-for-all” model, reinvesting profits into the rural communities where its employees live. Over the last decade, IndiVillage has impacted over 35,000 lives through sustainable community development initiatives such as access to clean drinking water, improved livelihoods, better healthcare, and standardized education. IndiVillage is among a select set of five Indian companies that have obtained the B Corp certification, which signals that the organization’s operations and business model meet the highest global standards of verified performance on social and environmental dimensions. 

IndiVillage was recently named as a ‘Company to Watch’ by The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’ (IAOP) in their Impact Sourcing Champions Index. The index features organisations that have used impact sourcing to make a profound contribution to disadvantaged communities with limited prospects. 

Media Enquiries
Brian Carvalho
IndiVillage
+91-998-072-3839
brian@indivillage.com




Swiggy partners with IndiVillage for data annotation exercise to accelerate its AI-first vision

Bangalore, 10 Sep 2020: Swiggy, India’s leading on-demand delivery platform, has partnered with IndiVillage to power solutioning and service delivery for the platform’s broader AI and ML charter. IndiVillage’s engagement  with Swiggy, which began in April this year, includes voice annotation work that provides training data for Swiggy’s ML algorithms.

IndiVillage is a BPO and social enterprise using impact sourcing to bring opportunity to rural India and offers cutting-edge solutions in the area of image and data annotation, natural language processing, and content optimization to technology and e-commerce companies.

An essential application of the speech data annotation undertaken by IndiVillage is the development of AI-driven speech recognition models for Swiggy’s call centre process. When call centre service executives move from one call to another, there is a need to efficiently extract information from the call data to understand the ‘voice of the customers’ to enable a deeper understanding of the issues faced by customers and accordingly solve for the same. The process requires labelled data, and IndiVillage supports Swiggy in this regard by annotating dozens of hours of speech data, an exercise made even more complicated due to India’s linguistic diversity, featuring calls in Hindi, English, and ‘Hinglish’. IndiVillage’s accurate and comprehensive service allowed Swiggy to establish a proof of concept for speech recognition – a development that has the potential to scale the partnership between the two companies.

As a tech-first organization, our vision is to deliver unparalleled convenience to our consumers, and this is a continuously evolving process. Considering the volume of transactions on the platform, we take an AI-led approach to deliver operations at scale. With tens of thousands of delivery partners serving millions of consumers across the country, the complexity is high, and AI becomes the game-changer. Partnering with firms like IndiVillage accelerates some of our key innovation efforts and the journey so far has been impactful. The team genuinely understands the problem statement in-depth, and customizes processes tuned to meet Swiggy’s unique needs” says Hemant Misra, VP & Head of Applied Research, Swiggy.

IndiVillage embraces a purpose-first ‘Business for Good’ model that has seen the company reinvest profits within the community to further education, healthcare, and access to clean drinking water. IndiVillage’s business model pivots around a workforce of 300+ hired from within the rural communities in which its centres operate. The company’s employees are then taught a wide range of tasks such as data entry, online cataloguing, content management, transcription, image tagging, and content tagging that support innovation in large businesses. 

“We are delighted to be partnering with an innovative and impactful leader like Swiggy. As a leader in the on-demand delivery space, Swiggy is at the forefront of innovation and customer experience. This journey is one that we are proud to partner. The best AI/ML solutions require high quality, organised, secure and unbiased training data that don’t compromise the intelligence of the algorithms and we fully believe that our services in this space will accelerate Swiggy’s transformation roadmap. Alongside our extensive data annotation capabilities and experience supporting cutting-edge AI for our clients, our ‘Business for Good’ mission believes that purpose and profit go hand in hand. Swiggy’s confidence in our ability is a testament to the success of our model. I am excited about the road ahead and look forward to a long-term association with India’s leading on-demand delivery platform” said IndiVillage CEO, Smita Malipatil.


In addition to Swiggy, IndiVillage, whose services are delivered out of offices in Yemmiganur, AP, and Raichur, Karnataka, supports some of the world’s leading ecommerce and technology companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion and Mercato, a testament to the firm’s quality of service. 

IndiVillage was recently named in The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) Impact Sourcing Champions Index of global leaders in impact sourcing, which features organisations that have used impact sourcing to make a profound contribution to disadvantaged communities with limited prospects. 

IndiVillage is also the first Indian ITeS company to be certified as a B-Corp organization, one that combines purpose and profit with distinction. Certified B Corporations are legally mandated to factor in a broader ecosystem, including employees, clients, suppliers, the community, and the environment in all decision-making processes. Working with Swiggy is another feather in the cap for the company looking to demonstrate that purpose and profit are not mutually exclusive goals. 

About IndiVillage

IndiVillage offers cutting edge solutions, including image and data annotation, natural language processing, and content optimization for some of the world’s leading technology and e-commerce companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion, Swiggy, and Mercato. It follows a “profit-for-all” model, reinvesting profits into the rural communities where its employees live. Over the last decade, IndiVillage has impacted over 35,000 lives through sustainable community development initiatives such as access to clean drinking water, improved livelihoods, better healthcare, and standardized education. IndiVillage is among a select set of five Indian companies that have obtained the B Corp certification, which signals that the organization’s operations and business model meet the highest global standards of verified performance on social and environmental dimensions. 

IndiVillage was recently named as a ‘Company to Watch’ by The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’ (IAOP) in their Impact Sourcing Champions Index. The index features organisations that have used impact sourcing to make a profound contribution to disadvantaged communities with limited prospects. 

About Swiggy

Founded in 2014, Swiggy is India’s leading on-demand delivery platform with a vision to elevate the quality of life for the urban consumer by offering unparalleled convenience. It connects consumers to thousands of restaurants and stores in over 500 cities. Using innovative technology, Swiggy provides a hassle-free, fast and reliable delivery experience. Every order delivered by Swiggy’s fleet of independent delivery partners engaged on a principal to principal basis, ensures a host of customer-centric features like lightning fast delivery, no minimum order value, live order tracking, and 24/7 customer support.

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Media Enquiries

Brian Carvalho, Head of PR & Communications, IndiVillage +91-998-072-3839 / brian@indivillage.com




Agricultural-Revolution

Agricultural Revolution 4.0

Technology has found its way into the backbone of the economy – Agriculture. We are now living in the age of a fourth agricultural revolution or the digital revolution. As one of the leading parameters in the Essential Eight technologies revolutionizing businesses today, artificial intelligence has its fair share in agriculture as well. From crop and livestock management, weather tracking, drone analytics, and labor management to precision agriculture, AI plays a major role in agricultural technology.

Agricultural-Revolution

But why the sudden spike?

Now more than ever, there is a need for increased efficiency and more productivity in the agricultural sector. Feeding nine billion people in 2050 seems quite challenging.  The demand for food is increasing at an alarming rate and the supply curve does not seem to catch up. Across the globe, this gap between demand and supply in the agricultural sector is widening and various attempts are being made to bridge it. The problems faced individually by farmers are multiplied leading to an overall dearth. While technology has been a boon to humanity in several cases, this has to be one other. Companies are now developing new technologies that allow farmers to control each variable in the farming process to help them increase their yield by finding customized solutions to each crop or farmland.

What the future of Agriculture looks like:

future-of-agriculture

Farmland Monitoring Made Easy: Satellite Imagery paired with Drone Analytics will allow algorithms to identify anomalies in each crop, ensuring that the farmer knows exactly which crop needs what kind of treatment. This field of aggrotech/agritech is also referred to as Precision Farming.

future-of-agriculture-second-image

Virtual Livestock Management: Parameters like the heart rate, respiratory rate, blood levels, etc. can be monitored constantly to prevent the livestock from illnesses, and all of this can be done virtually through cameras that capture the live movement of the cattle.

One-Stop-Shop for Analyzing Data: Variables that affect farming such as weather conditions, water usage monitoring, soil conditions, and temperature management can be done under one roof thanks to advancements in technology, thereby reducing human intervention.

Overall Cost Reduction: With automated monitoring on all platforms and targeted solutions to each problem, the overall cost of production in agriculture will see a drastic reduction. Technologies like AI bots will also solve the problem of labour challenges in this sector, which is another cost-cutting factor. 

Though the induction of Artificial Intelligence into one of the most primary industries in the world has its own disadvantages, at this stage, the benefits seem to take higher priority. But in order to train any algorithm to perform all the above-mentioned functions, human input is inevitable. Only after feeding large amounts of data into the algorithm and training it to understand and analyze parameters, will any technology be successful to function optimally on its own.