About
A complete AI services partner — built on a 16-year investment in our people.
1,000+ specialists across 11 rural community offices in India. 96% retention over 16 years. 50% women. B Corp certified. Dogfooded across Machani Group’s own robotics programme. The proof that accuracy compounds when your team stays.
Heritage · 1934 — today
From a 1934 weavers’ cooperative to 11 rural AI centres.
The work began in 1934, when Machani Somappa founded a weavers’ cooperative to lift skilled craftspeople out of rural poverty. The ethical model — build long-term livelihoods inside the communities you operate in, rather than extract from them — earned him India’s first Padma Shri honour in 1954. The same operating principle still governs every IndiVillage centre today.
In 2010, Ravi Machani — now Chairman of Machani Group — opened the first modern IndiVillage technology centre in Yemmiganur, India. The motivation was a conversation with the late Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, former President of India and a champion of rural opportunity, who urged the family to “create more jobs.” The first centre employed local STEM graduates who would otherwise have had to leave home to find work. The model has now grown to 11 community-based centres across rural India, 1,000+ full-time specialists, and 50% women in the workforce.
What started as an ethical employment model became the commercial moat. Same families, same villages, same teams — for sixteen years. Annotation knowledge compounds. Quality holds. Customers stay. The work below is the result.
From our CEO — Manju Kesani
The thesis
Why retention is our quality moat.
Annotation accuracy degrades at scale. Not because tools fail, but because knowledge evaporates. Gig-platform teams rotate at 60–70% a year. Each departure is task-specific expertise lost. New annotators re-learn the taxonomy. Consistency collapses. The model sees degraded training data and accuracy drifts.
IndiVillage operates differently. 96% annual retention over 16 years. Same team on the same problems, year after year. Task-specific knowledge compounds. By year three on a programme, your annotators have seen every edge case. They know your taxonomy better than you do. Consistency strengthens. Accuracy rises.
This is not a feel-good story. It is the structural reason we deliver 98.7% accuracy at scale without drift. Multi-pass review, gold sets, and drift monitoring matter. But they only work if the same people are applying them to the same problems. Retention is the foundation on which everything else stands.
The model
Impact Sourcing, made commercial.
We hire specialists from rural India, build long-term careers, and operate under B Corp governance. The ethical model produces commercial advantage. Lower cost of attrition means fewer hiring-and-training cycles. Experienced teams scale faster. Ethical procurement signals matter to buyers in healthcare and regulated industries. Compliance is pre-vetted.
The proof: 11 offices across rural India. 1,000+ employees. 50% women. 92% STEM graduates. 96% retention. 98.7% accuracy across 500M+ datapoints. No churn, no quality drift, no vendor lock-in risk.
B Corp certification ensures this model is structural, not aspirational. Annual audits verify our employment practices, environmental impact, and community investment.
How we operate
Four principles that govern the work.
01
AI with impact.
Models are judged by accuracy numbers, but they live or die on the decisions they enable. We build for the decision — the surgeon’s diagnosis, the farmer’s spray plan, the rebate paid to the right family. Performance metrics are the measure, not the goal.
02
Powered by partnerships.
Clients are co-creators of the spec. Annotators are the primary investment. We do not subcontract, we do not rotate teams off your programme to chase margin, and we do not gate the model architecture behind “proprietary” runtime. The relationship is the asset.
03
Brains without borders.
Rural India produces 92% STEM graduates inside our workforce — engineers, agriculturalists, biologists, linguists — who would not normally be the people labelling your data. They bring perspectives Bay-Area gig platforms structurally cannot. Edge cases land differently when the annotator has lived them.
04
Success you can see.
Every engagement carries a written acceptance test — the accuracy target and the held-out set that proves it. You see the number, monthly. You see drift. You see the retrain cycle. No black boxes, no aggregate fudge, no “trust us”.
Inside the centres
People
Leadership.
Ravi Machani
Chairman, Machani Group
Chairman of Machani Group — a diversified portfolio spanning automotive, manufacturing, hospitality, and technology. The instigator of the modern IndiVillage centre in Yemmiganur in 2010 following a directive from Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to “create more jobs.” 25+ years in operations, market development, and strategic expansion. MBA in Finance from Bradley University; B.E. in Mechanical and Electronics Engineering.
LinkedIn
Manju Kesani
Chief Executive Officer
CEO of IndiVillage Tech Solutions. Operates the 11-centre delivery network across rural India, the 1,000+ specialist workforce, and the customer-facing accuracy programme. Co-founded the modern IndiVillage in 2010 alongside Ravi Machani.
Laurynas Barauskas
Chief Operating Officer
COO of IndiVillage Tech Solutions. Runs the operations stack across all 11 community-based centres — production scheduling, accuracy assurance, drift monitoring, and the QA framework that holds 98.7% across 500M+ annotated datapoints. Also serves as Data Protection Officer for the UK entity.
Mark Pinnes
SVP Global Partnerships
Leads global partnerships at IndiVillage Tech Solutions and Machani Group. Over 20 years across B2B, B2C and impact sectors, with commercial relationships across three continents. At IndiVillage, he connects high-growth clients in robotics, autonomous systems, and agritech with a team that has kept 96% of its annotators over 16 years.
LinkedIn
Evan Goldsmith
VP Strategic Partnerships
Drives strategic partnerships and key account expansion across IndiVillage’s North American customer base. Sector focus: robotics, autonomous systems, and platform-tier accounts.
Rahul Chatterjee
Chief Growth Officer, Machani Group
Chief Growth Officer of Machani Group. 12+ years in business development, strategy, and organisational scaling across North America and South Asia. Founder of Hope for Women LLC, a social enterprise for women’s economic empowerment. MS in Environmental Policy, Brown University.
LinkedIn
Priyanka Malhotra
Chief Financial Officer
Heads finance and people operations at IndiVillage Tech Solutions, including the UK entity. Stewards the long-tenure compensation model that holds 96% retention across the rural centre network.
The non-profit arm
IndiVillage Foundation.
The IndiVillage Foundation is the non-profit arm of IndiVillage Tech Solutions. Its mission: bridge the learning and skill gaps in rural India. Three programmes run across the same communities our technology centres operate in — early-childhood education for ages 4–8, STEM for girls aged 13–18, and career readiness for young adults aged 18–32.
To date, 100,000+ individuals across rural India have been engaged through Foundation programmes. The Foundation is the long-arc reason the technology centres can recruit 92% STEM graduates locally — invest in the schools, the laboratories, and the apprenticeships, and the workforce is there a generation later.
Visit IndiVillage Foundation →
Group
Part of Machani Group.
IndiVillage was built originally to serve Machani Group’s own AI data needs. We built it because we needed it. Dogfooding — using the product ourselves — is the credibility differentiator. Machani Group operates CeCe and RIA, companion robots in production for the care sector. The same annotation and model training team that powers those robots also serves external clients in robotics, healthcare, agriculture, and eCommerce.
We understand data pipelines, edge cases, and deployment challenges because we live them. When we tell a customer “we’ve solved this problem,” we mean it — we solved it first for our own robotics programme. This is not theoretical expertise. It is operational knowledge hardened by production constraints.
Certification
Certified B Corp.
B Corp certification verifies that an organisation meets high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. It means our employment practices are independently audited annually. It means profits are reinvested into community impact and staff development. It means we are legally committed to balancing stakeholder interests alongside shareholder returns.
For buyers in healthcare, regulated industries, and companies with ESG mandates, B Corp status is a procurement signal — you can assign IndiVillage to your supplier code of conduct compliance process. The certification is already in place.
Certified since 2019. View our B Corp certification to verify status.
Two entities, one operation
IndiVillage UK Pvt Ltd (Companies House 14512282) is the owner of this website and the UK entity through which services are delivered. Registered office: 40 Gordon Place, London, England, W8 4JF.
IndiVillage Tech Solutions is the Indian operating entity based in Bengaluru, with 1,000+ specialists across 11 rural community offices. This is where the annotation, enrichment, and model training work is delivered.
Speak with
Mark Pinnes
SVP Global Partnerships