AI data platform iMerit believes the next step toward integrating AI tools at the enterprise level is not more data, but better data. The startup has quietly built itself into a trusted data annotation partner for companies working in computer vision, medical imaging, autonomous mobility, and other AI applications that require high-accuracy, human-in-the-loop labeling. Now, iMerit is bringing its Scholars program out of beta. The goal of the program is to build a growing workforce of experts to fine-tune generative AI models for enterprise applications and, increasingly, foundational models. iMerit doesn’t claim to replace Scale AI’s core offering of high-throughput, developer-focused “blitz data.” Instead, it’s betting that now is the right moment to double down on expert-led, high-quality data, the kind that requires deep human judgment and domain-specific oversight. iMerit’s experts are tasked with finetuning, or “tormenting,” enterprise and foundational AI models using the startup’s proprietary platform Ango Hub. Ango allows iMerit’s “Scholars” to interact with the customer’s model to generate and evaluate problems for the model to solve. For iMerritt, attracting and retaining cognitive experts is key to success because the experts aren’t just doing a few tasks and disappearing; they’re working on projects for multiple years. The goal is to grow across other enterprise applications, including finance and medicine.