Tech Mahindra, India’s fifth-largest IT services firm, said on Thursday (22 October 2026) that it has partnered with SpaceXSI to use AI to help companies modernise legacy applications and speed up software development. The Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI partnership will also bring in the chatbot Grok Build to set up industry-specific solutions. The announcement was reported by Reuters from Bengaluru, and it is the first such tie-up between an Indian IT major and SpaceX’s AI division.
What the Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI partnership covers
The partnership will focus on supporting organisations across three sectors: technology, telecommunications, and banking and financial services. Legacy applications are the older software systems companies still run on, and modernising them means moving them onto current technology so they are cheaper to maintain and easier to change. Speeding up software development means using AI to write, test and review code faster than teams working on their own. The Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI deal puts both of those jobs at the centre of its pitch to clients, and it is another area the Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI partnership will target as it rolls out.
Modernisation work is slow when done by hand. It means reading code written years ago, working out what it does, and rebuilding it on current platforms, and companies with decades of accumulated systems can spend years on the work. AI promises to take on the reading and the rewriting, which is where the Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI partnership says the speed gains will come from.
Grok Build and industry-specific solutions
Grok Build, described in the announcement as a chatbot, is the second leg of the deal. Tech Mahindra said it would bring Grok Build in to set up industry-specific solutions: software shaped around the needs of a particular sector rather than generic tools sold to everyone. Industry-specific solutions are software built for one sector’s workflows rather than one-size-fits-all tools, and Grok Build is the chatbot Tech Mahindra will use to assemble them. A bank, a telecom operator and a technology firm run different systems and answer to different regulators, so the pitch is that each gets software built for its own workflows. Chatbots that build software mark a change in how code gets written: instead of typing every line, developers describe what they want and the model drafts it, and industry-specific versions tune that drafting to one sector’s vocabulary and rules. Grok Build is the second leg of the Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI deal, and the company said industry-specific builds would be its job.
Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI: a first for Indian IT
The deal is the first time an Indian IT major has collaborated with the AI division of rocket maker SpaceX. SpaceX is a rocket maker, and SpaceXSI is its AI division; this is the first time that division has worked with an Indian IT major. Tech Mahindra already has similar pacts with Google Gemini and Microsoft, and the Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI agreement extends that run of AI tie-ups. The company is stacking partnerships with the biggest names in AI, and SpaceXSI is now the third on that list.
In practice, speeding up development means AI writing first drafts of code, writing tests, and reviewing changes, with engineers checking the output. The pitch is that this loop runs faster than development done entirely by hand, and that is the work the new partnership is aimed at.
Where the partnership fits
The three sectors named in the announcement, technology, telecommunications, and banking and financial services, are among the largest buyers of IT services. All three run large portfolios of older software, which is the market the Tech Mahindra SpaceXSI partnership is aimed at. Tech Mahindra is India’s fifth-largest IT firm, and the SpaceXSI deal makes it the first among its domestic peers to work with the AI division of the rocket maker. The announcement was reported by Nishit Navin and Sai Ishwarbharath B in Bengaluru, with editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Aseem Gujar.