Company Profile / Enterprise IT & AI
The quiet giant that trained itself to be AI-first - then ran a record IPO
How a spin-off from an Indian computer-training business became a 32,000-person, AI-first services firm - and pulled off the biggest technology-services IPO in over a decade.
Every enterprise-software company loves to say it is "AI-first." Hexaware Technologies did the unglamorous version of the phrase first: before it tried to sell AI to anyone, it put roughly 99% of its own IT workforce - engineers, delivery leads, senior management - through generative-AI training. Only then did the pitch go out to clients. It is a small tell about a company that has spent 35 years turning other people's technology headaches into recurring revenue, mostly out of view.
If you have never heard of Hexaware, that is not unusual, and it is arguably the point. The firm does not sell to consumers. It sells to the banks that clear your payments, the insurers that price your policy, the hospitals that store your records and the airlines that reschedule your flight. Its work shows up as software that quietly keeps running - which, in enterprise IT, is the entire job.
01 / OriginsFrom a training company to a services firm
Hexaware's roots trace back to 1990 and to Atul Nishar, the entrepreneur behind the Indian computer-training brand Aptech. The IT-services arm was carved out and, in 2001, renamed Hexaware Technologies Limited. Nishar remains the company's Chairman Emeritus. In 2014, R Srikrishna - an IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta alumnus - took over as CEO and set the direction that still defines the company: modernize legacy systems, move workloads to the cloud, and, more recently, wrap the whole delivery model around AI.
02 / The businessWhat Hexaware actually sells
Strip away the acronyms and the business is straightforward: Hexaware is a B2B services firm that gets paid to build, modernize and run enterprise technology. That breaks into a familiar set of lines - application development and modernization, cloud and infrastructure management, data and analytics, digital assurance (software testing), and business-process services such as AI-enabled contact centers. The work is delivered through a global model that mixes offshore, nearshore and onshore teams, and it is sold under time-and-materials, managed-services and outcome-based contracts.
The company organizes itself around 12 industries, with the heaviest concentration in banking and financial services, capital markets, insurance, healthcare and life sciences, travel and transportation, and manufacturing and consumer. These are industries with a lot of old, load-bearing software - the kind you cannot simply switch off - which is precisely where a modernization specialist earns its keep.
The customer list, by design, is not glamorous. Hexaware's clients are largely Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises that need a partner to run and evolve systems most people never see: core banking engines, claims-processing pipelines, reservation platforms, patient-data stores. The value proposition is less "here is a shiny new app" and more "we will keep the machine running while quietly making it cheaper, faster and less brittle." In a services business, that trust - built contract by contract - is the real asset, and it is what makes revenue recurring rather than one-off.
"Our singular purpose is to create smiles through great people and technology."- Hexaware mission statement
03 / The platformsAmaze, Tensai, RapidX, Agentverse
Services firms live and die on utilization, so the smart ones build reusable software to make delivery faster and margins fatter. Hexaware has four platforms doing that work, each a different bet on the same idea - that automation should sit inside the service, not beside it.
The problem each one solves is specific. Amaze goes after the single scariest moment in any transformation program - the migration itself, when a live system has to move to the cloud without breaking. Tensai targets the grind of high-volume operations, the repetitive decisions and processes that eat headcount. RapidX aims squarely at the cost of building software in the first place, using AI agents to compress the engineering lifecycle. Agentverse is the newest bet, extending that agent approach from code to whole business workflows. Together they let Hexaware make a claim its larger rivals also make but that it can move on faster: that AI is not a line item bolted onto delivery, but the delivery itself.
AI-powered platform that automates and accelerates cloud migration and application modernization while minimizing business disruption.
Machine-learning and GenAI automation for decisioning and business processes, including a knowledge module for operational guidance.
Agentic AI platform that reimagines software engineering, using AI agents to augment developers across the delivery lifecycle.
A platform to build, orchestrate and deploy autonomous agents across enterprise workflows.
04 / The numbersGrowth you can put on a slide
The AI-first story would be marketing if the numbers did not move. They have. Hexaware reported CY2025 revenue of USD 1,537.4 million, up 7.6% year over year, with fourth-quarter revenue of USD 389 million and a modest expansion in EBITDA margin. In a services market where clients have been cautious with discretionary spending, mid-single-digit-plus growth is a respectable result, and it lands on top of a decade of steady expansion.
05 / The ownerCarlyle's take-private, then the record relist
Hexaware has been public before. Its second act on the stock market is the more interesting one. In 2021, The Carlyle Group acquired the company and delisted it, then spent the next few years reworking the operating model. In February 2025, Carlyle brought it back - a relisting on the NSE and BSE that raised roughly USD 1 billion and was described as the largest technology-services IPO globally in over a decade, and India's largest in the sector. For a private-equity owner, it is close to a textbook arc: buy, rebuild, relist.
"It's our people-first approach that truly sets us apart and drives our success."- R Srikrishna, CEO
06 / The moatHow it tries to stand out
Hexaware is a mid-cap in a field of giants. Its competitors include Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, LTIMindtree, Cognizant and closer peers such as Mphasis, Coforge and Persistent Systems - many of them several times its size. Competing on raw scale is not the play. Instead, the differentiation is meant to come from three things: a genuinely AI-native delivery model, the proprietary platforms that ride on top of it, and a willingness to buy specific capabilities rather than build everything in-house.
That acquisition habit reads like a map of where the company thinks demand is heading. FocusFrame (2006) brought testing depth. Mobiquity (2019) added customer-experience and cloud-native design. Softcrylic (2024) strengthened data and analytics. In 2025 alone, SMC Squared expanded its global-capability-center business and CyberSolve added identity, access management and cybersecurity - the parts of enterprise IT that only get more valuable as more of it runs on AI.
07 / The ecosystemWhose cloud it builds on
No modern services firm operates alone, and Hexaware's expertise is partly a map of its alliances. It runs deep partnerships with the major hyperscalers - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud - and builds much of its AI tooling on top of them; Amaze, for instance, leans on AWS services such as Textract and Comprehend for document processing. Around that sit implementation practices for the enterprise platforms clients actually run their businesses on: SAP and its S/4HANA suite, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and identity and security tooling reinforced by the 2025 CyberSolve acquisition. The breadth matters because enterprise buyers rarely want a single-vendor bet - they want a partner fluent in whatever stack they already have.
08 / The culturePeople-first, or a good slogan?
A six-word mission - "create smiles through great people and technology" - is either endearing or eye-rolling depending on your tolerance for corporate warmth. What gives it a little weight is that the company runs internal programs to back it up. Brainbox, its innovation initiative, crowdsources ideas from employees at scale, with one round reportedly gathering nearly 6,000 submissions. In a labor-intensive services business, where the product is essentially the people, retention and morale are not soft metrics - they are the balance sheet.
09 / The fitWhere it sits in the market
Think of the IT-services market as a pyramid. At the top sit the mega-caps that handle the largest, longest outsourcing contracts. At the base sit thousands of boutiques. Hexaware occupies the useful middle: large enough to win Fortune 500 and Global 2000 work and deliver it across continents, small enough to move faster than the giants and reorganize around a bet like AI without a multi-year committee process. Its future depends on staying nimble in that band while the majors pour resources into the same AI transition - a race where being early, as Hexaware has tried to be, is worth something.