Vishal Sikka, former CEO of Infosys, has launched Hang Ten Systems, a new startup aiming to disrupt the IT services industry with AI-driven solutions. The company raised $32 million in a seed round led by Mayfield, with strategic investments from Aramco Ventures and participation from angel investors. Hang Ten Systems claims to help enterprises continuously build, modify, and operate software using AI-driven development and automation. The startup is entering a market where IT services firms are racing to adapt to AI through partnerships with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. The launch comes amid a growing debate over whether AI will expand the industry’s addressable market or fundamentally alter how enterprise software is built, maintained, and delivered. According to Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha, the company 'just got started a month back' and already has customers. The startup is working with customers including Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius on AI-native project delivery. In a separate blog post, Sikka said Hang Ten was already helping large enterprises 'hang ten on the biggest wave of our lifetimes.'

Headquartered in the Bay Area, Hang Ten is hiring across delivery, engineering, sales, and leadership and plans to expand globally to meet enterprise demand. The early crew includes executives who have worked with Sikka across SAP, Infosys, and his previous enterprise AI startup, VianAI. Among them are co-founders Navin Budhiraja, the startup’s CTO, Sanjay Rajagopalan, its chief design officer, and Tao Liu, its senior vice president of forward deployed engineering. After stepping down as Infosys’ chief executive in 2017, Sikka founded VianAI, which emerged from stealth in 2019 with $50 million in seed funding and later raised $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Chaddha told TechCrunch that Hang Ten is distinct from VianAI, describing Sikka’s earlier venture as focused on a different market. VianAI focused on enterprise AI applications and analytics tools designed to help businesses use artificial intelligence in decision-making. Hang Ten, by contrast, describes itself as an enterprise AI services company built around agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and domain expertise.

Source: techcrunch