Hang Ten Systems, the AI services startup founded by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka in May, has raised a $53M seed extension just five weeks after closing its initial $32M seed. The new round, led by Temasek's early-stage platform Xora, brings the four-month-old company's total funding to $85M and reflects one of the faster back-to-back seed closes in recent enterprise AI memory.
Mayfield, which led the first tranche, returned for the extension. The cap table also includes Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who sits on Hang Ten's board. Sikka declined to disclose a valuation but said the second close was a step up from the first.
The Palo Alto-based startup sells AI strategy consulting and custom software builds to enterprises with more than $10B in annual revenue. The pitch is that generative AI has collapsed the economics of writing code, and that the value now sits in requirements definition and validation rather than in the typing itself.
“The build part itself has basically become close to zero marginal cost, close to zero time”— Vishal Sikka, Hang Ten Systems founder and former Infosys CEO
Key facts
- 01Hang Ten Systems closed a $53M seed extension just five weeks after its initial $32M seed, taking total funding to $85M.
- 02Temasek's early-stage platform Xora led the round, with participation from Mayfield, Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.
- 03The four-month-old startup counts 21 major enterprises as customers or late-stage prospects, including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy.
- 04Hang Ten claims a 10x improvement in cost or speed, deploying teams of 2 to 4 engineers on projects that traditionally required around 30 people.
- 05Founder Vishal Sikka says the startup has already received acquisition offers from very big companies and turned them down.
That thesis is moving deals unusually fast. Sikka told TechCrunch that Hang Ten signed a multimillion-dollar contract to build a mission-critical system within 25 days of the first customer meeting — a cycle he said he had never seen in enterprise software. The company is now working with or negotiating with 21 major enterprises, including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy, spanning the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It has secured multiple seven-figure contracts and is pursuing eight-figure deals.
Xora reached out to invest after seeing those early wins, Sikka said, and plans to introduce Hang Ten to other companies inside Temasek's portfolio. The fresh capital will go toward expanding engineering, consulting, and sales headcount. Hang Ten currently has 20 to 25 employees across the US, the Middle East, and Australia, with hiring planned in Europe and India.
CTO Sanjay Rajagopalan said the company's edge comes from an in-house framework called Hobie, which packages reusable AI skills tailored to regulated industries and complex enterprise projects. Engineers use Hobie to compress delivery times: some engagements that would traditionally have required around 30 people are being staffed with teams of two to four, with customers or independent third parties handling final quality checks and certification.
Hang Ten promises customers a 10-fold improvement in cost, speed, or a combination of both. More than half of current opportunities involve new projects that companies had previously deferred, rather than direct rip-and-replace work, though Sikka said many engagements are also displacing incumbent systems integrators.
The competitive field is dense. OpenAI and Anthropic are both pushing deeper into enterprise deployments, and the legacy consulting firms — including Sikka's former employer Infosys — are racing to embed generative AI into their delivery models. Sikka's answer is that customers want a partner that is not tied to any single model provider.
He also argues that starting from scratch is an advantage against the incumbents. "We are fortunate that we don't have the burden of legacy that we have to transform," he said, a pointed line from someone who ran a 300,000-person services firm.
Sikka's previous act was VianAI, which he co-founded in 2019 after leaving Infosys in 2017. That startup raised $50M in seed funding and $140M in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Sikka departed VianAI in April, according to his LinkedIn profile, and told TechCrunch that the company is now "going through a transaction." He declined to elaborate. Hang Ten, meanwhile, has already fielded acquisition offers from what Sikka described as very big companies, and turned them down.
The Hang Ten story is a useful data point on where enterprise AI budgets are actually moving. Model providers get the headlines, but the money at the $10B-revenue tier still flows through delivery partners who can write contracts, ship production software, and absorb the compliance work. If a four-month-old firm can raise $85M and land Saudi Aramco and Siemens Energy on the strength of a small-team, high-leverage delivery model, the pressure on legacy systems integrators to compress their own project economics — or lose the work — just went up significantly.
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