Former Infosys CEO's AI startup Hang Ten Systems raises $53m

What happened

Vishal Sikka’s AI startup Hang Ten Systems has raised $53 million in its latest funding round, taking its total war chest to $85 million just four months after launching.

The fresh capital injection, led by Temasek-backed Xora Innovation, comes just five weeks after the firm announced an initial $32 million seed round. Existing investors Mayfield and Aramco Ventures joined the round, alongside high-profile tech executives including Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, Micron boss Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who is also taking a seat on the startup's board.

What does Hang Ten Systems do

Unlike consumer-facing generative AI giants like OpenAI or Anthropic, Hang Ten is not building foundational models from scratch. Instead, the firm acts as an execution partner, helping large corporations integrate AI into their complex software development and technology stacks. Its target is the costly, slow-moving world of enterprise IT.

The startup relies on an in-house framework called Hobie, which organises reusable AI skills to automate tasks like software migration, development, finance, and analytics. Sanjay Rajagopalan, Hang Ten's co-founder and chief design officer, claims the platform dramatically shrinks the manpower needed for engineering projects. Under this system, teams of just two to four people can execute work that previously required around 30 engineers, while final quality checks and certifications are left to the clients or independent third parties.

Sikka's vision

Sikka, the 59-year-old former chief executive of Infosys and chief technology officer of SAP, argues that AI is fundamentally shifting how software is created. "The build part itself has basically become close to zero marginal cost, close to zero time," Sikka told TechCrunch in an interview. In his view, developers will spend less time writing lines of code and more time explaining what the system needs to do and validating the results.

The pitch seems to be working. Hang Ten says it has already secured several multimillion-dollar contracts, including deals with Saudi Aramco and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy. Sikka revealed that the company wrapped up one major contract within 25 days of its first meeting with the client. It is currently in talks with or working for 21 major corporations across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

What happens next

The massive seed capital highlights a growing battleground between nimble AI automation startups and traditional IT giants like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, which are rushing to protect their core business by offering their own AI services. Phil Inagaki, managing partner at Xora Innovation, noted in a statement that enterprise tech has historically been a massive cost line that is slow to translate AI into actual economic value. The bottleneck, he argued, is secure and fast deployment.

Hang Ten plans to spend the newly acquired funds on expanding its engineering, consulting, and sales teams, alongside developing its core platform. The company also intends to expand its operations into Singapore and the wider Southeast Asian market.