xAI Pursues Finance Sector Growth Before SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk’s xAI is focusing on the finance sector as it works to boost its revenue ahead of the initial public offering (IPO) of its parent company, SpaceX, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (May 13), citing unnamed sources.

The company is looking to sell subscriptions to its chatbot and access to its computing resources, according to the report.

xAI is pitching its Grok chatbot as a tool for gathering internal company information for performance reviews and for using data from Musk’s social media platform X, the report said.

The company is also focusing on training Grok for work in the finance sector by teaching it to read documents and Excel spreadsheets and to handle financial modeling, per the report.

xAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

It was reported in April that SpaceX was demanding that banks, lawyers and other advisers who want access to the company’s long-awaited IPO must subscribe to Grok.

Some of the banks have agreed to spend millions on Grok subscriptions and have begun integrating it into their IT systems, according to the report.

SpaceX’s IPO is expected to raise more than $50 billion at a valuation of upwards of $1 trillion, meaning banks could realize fees of more than $500 million for advising on the listing, according to the April report.

It was reported in March that xAI was hiring bankers and private credit lenders to provide lessons as part of the company’s effort to make Grok better at offering financial strategies.

The company aimed to recruit Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts for its data annotation teams that train the chatbot. These professionals are expected to help Grok reason through things like leveraged loan syndication and collateralized loan obligations, according to the report.

The March report said that other AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, had already introduced tools for financial analysts.

When xAI announced in January, before its acquisition by SpaceX, that it raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round, the company said the financing would “accelerate our world-leading infrastructure buildout, enable the rapid development and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, and fuel groundbreaking research advancing xAI’s core mission: Understanding the Universe.”