Former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Launches AI Services Startup Hang Ten Systems with $32 Million Seed Round

What Hang Ten Actually Is

Hang Ten Systems describes itself as an enterprise AI services company built around agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and domain expertise, according to TechCrunch. Translation: it wants to automate the unglamorous but enormously profitable work that firms like Infosys, Wipro, and Accenture have done for decades, specifically customizing, integrating, and maintaining enterprise software for large corporations.

The $32 million seed round was led by Mayfield, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and participation from undisclosed angel investors. The startup's board includes Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. Hang Ten is headquartered in the Bay Area.

Sikka's Track Record

Vishal Sikka, 59, has relevant credentials. He spent nearly two decades at SAP building enterprise software and later joined Apple's board. He ran Infosys, one of India's largest IT services firms, from 2014 until his resignation in 2017 following a public dispute with the company's founders over governance and strategy.

After leaving Infosys, he founded VianAI, which raised $50 million in seed funding when it emerged from stealth in 2019 and added $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch that VianAI and Hang Ten address fundamentally different markets. VianAI focused on enterprise AI applications and analytics tools for business decision-making. Hang Ten is going after the services layer: the actual build, modification, and operation of software.

Chaddha also told TechCrunch that Hang Ten had customers within roughly one month of getting started, an unusually fast commercial start for a seed-stage company, though the number of customers and contract values were not disclosed.

The Stated Customers

Hang Ten said it is working with Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius on what it calls AI-native project delivery. Both are large industrial enterprises, exactly the kind of organizations that historically spend heavily on IT services firms to manage complex software environments. Neither Siemens Gamesa nor Fresenius has made independent public statements about the engagements, so the scope and financial terms are unknown as of June 25, 2026.

The startup's early team is drawn largely from Sikka's prior work. Co-founders include Navin Budhiraja as CTO, Sanjay Rajagopalan as chief design officer, and Tao Liu as senior vice president of forward deployed engineering, all of whom have worked with Sikka across SAP, Infosys, or VianAI, according to their LinkedIn profiles as reported by TechCrunch.

The Case for Skepticism

Anyone who has watched enterprise AI pitches over the past three years has heard this story before. The argument that AI will eat IT services has been made by dozens of startups, and the large incumbents are not standing still. Infosys itself has active partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI. Accenture has committed billions to AI practices. IBM has reorganized entire business units around AI-assisted services delivery.

The incumbents have something Hang Ten does not: decades of institutional knowledge about client environments, regulatory constraints, and the organizational politics that actually determine whether software projects succeed. Replacing that with agentic code generation is a reasonable hypothesis, but it remains unproven at enterprise scale. Hang Ten has two named customers and a month of operating history.

There is also a structural question about the addressable market. If AI dramatically reduces the labor required to deliver IT services, it could shrink the dollar value of that market even as it expands what is technically possible. Firms that win on efficiency may still earn less than the firms they are disrupting. TechCrunch noted this directly: the industry is debating whether AI will expand the market or fundamentally alter how software is built and delivered. Hang Ten's $32 million bet is that it can capture value in the transition regardless of how that question resolves.

Why This Bet Still Makes Sense to Watch

The strongest argument for taking Hang Ten seriously is Sikka's specific background. He is not a generic AI entrepreneur applying chatbot wrappers to enterprise workflows. He built core enterprise software at SAP for nearly two decades, then ran a $10 billion revenue IT services firm. He has seen both sides of the table. Mayfield's Chaddha explicitly cited that career experience as the primary reason the firm led the round.

Aramco Ventures' participation is also noteworthy. Saudi Aramco's venture arm tends to invest with an eye toward operational transformation of large industrial enterprises, exactly the customer profile Hang Ten is targeting with Siemens Gamesa and Fresenius.

Hang Ten told TechCrunch it is hiring across delivery, engineering, sales, and leadership and plans to expand to multiple global locations to meet enterprise demand. At $32 million in seed funding, that runway is limited relative to what scaling an enterprise services business typically requires. Whether the company raises a Series A, and at what valuation, will be a more meaningful signal of whether the market believes the thesis.