Hang Ten, ex-Infosys chief Sikka's AI startup, adds $53M weeks after seed

Hang Ten Systems, the enterprise AI startup founded by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka in May, has added $53 million to its seed round — just five weeks after closing its first $32 million tranche, TechCrunch reports. The extension brings the four-month-old company's total funding to $85 million and underscores how quickly investors are moving to back AI-native professional services firms.

Who put in the money

Temasek's early-stage investment platform Xora led the round, with Mayfield — which led the original seed — participating again. Also joining were Aramco Ventures, Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who already sits on Hang Ten's board.

Sikka declined to share a valuation but told TechCrunch the extension priced the company above its previous round. He said Xora initiated the conversation after watching Hang Ten's early customer wins, and that the Temasek connection offers a path into a wider portfolio of potential enterprise clients.

What the company actually does

Hang Ten works with very large companies — typically those with more than $10 billion in annual revenue — advising them on AI strategy and building or modernizing their software. Its premise is that AI has fundamentally changed the economics of development.

"The build part itself has basically become close to zero marginal cost, close to zero time," Sikka told TechCrunch, arguing that the center of gravity in software projects is shifting from writing code to specifying what systems should do and verifying that they actually do it.

Co-founder and chief design officer Sanjay Rajagopalan said engineers work with an internal framework called Hobie, which packages reusable AI skills for regulated industries and complex enterprise projects. Teams of roughly two to four people can deliver work that previously required around 30, he said, although customers or independent third parties still handle final quality checks and certification. The pitch to clients is a tenfold gain in cost, speed, or a blend of both.

Unusually fast traction

For a startup this young, Hang Ten's sales motion is remarkably quick. One customer signed a multimillion-dollar contract for a mission-critical system 25 days after the first meeting — a pace Sikka said he had never encountered in enterprise deals.

The Palo Alto-based company is now engaged with a mix of existing customers and late-stage prospects across 21 major enterprises, some of which are already in proposal or contract negotiations. Clients and targets span the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and include Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco and Siemens Energy. Hang Ten has secured multiple seven-figure contracts and is chasing eight-figure deals.

Sikka said many engagements displace incumbent systems integrators, though more than half of the current pipeline consists of projects companies had previously shelved rather than work taken from existing vendors. The startup has also fielded acquisition offers from what he called "very big companies" — and turned them down while it focuses on growth.

A crowded, contested market

Hang Ten is competing on two fronts: AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing deeper into enterprise offerings, while traditional consultancies race to fold generative AI into their services. Sikka's counterargument is that large enterprises will still want advisors with no stake in any particular model or platform. The company's differentiation is explicitly not model-building, but adapting existing AI to messy enterprise software processes — as Rajagopalan put it, shipping production systems rather than proofs of concept.

Sikka's second act

This is Sikka's second AI venture since leaving Infosys in 2017. He co-founded VianAI in 2019, which raised a $50 million seed and later $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. He departed VianAI in April, according to his LinkedIn profile, and told TechCrunch the company is "going through a transaction" without elaborating.

Hang Ten, named after the surfing maneuver, currently has about 20 to 25 employees across the U.S., Middle East and Australia, and plans to spend the new capital on expanding its engineering, consulting and sales teams, including hiring in Europe and India.

Why it matters

The round signals where venture money sees the next opening: not in foundation models, but in the layer that applies them to enterprise software at scale. If Sikka's thesis holds — that small teams armed with AI can undercut traditional integrators on cost and speed by an order of magnitude — the established IT services industry, his former employer included, faces structural pressure. The startup's early deal velocity suggests some very large enterprises are already willing to pay. The open question is whether AI-native delivery is durable differentiation, or a capability the big consultancies will eventually absorb.