Former Infosys chief’s AI startup nabs another $53M
TechCrunch Jagmeet Singh ● Covered by 2 sources
Vishal Sikka’s new AI startup just raised another $53 million. It’s landed enterprise contracts fast, and it’s pitching itself as a software builder, not another model lab.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Jagmeet Singh — read the original for the full story.
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Hang Ten Systems, the AI startup founded by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, has added another $53 million to its seed funding just four months after launch. That brings its total funding to $85 million, after a first $32 million seed round closed only five weeks earlier.
Temasek’s early-stage investment platform Xora led the new round. Mayfield, which led the earlier seed, stayed in. So did Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who also sits on Hang Ten’s board.
Sikka’s pitch is straightforward: big companies do not just need help with AI strategy, they need help rebuilding the software work itself. Hang Ten focuses on enterprises with more than $10 billion in annual revenue, advising them on AI and helping modernize their systems. Sikka says the real shift is away from writing code and toward defining requirements and checking whether software actually does what it should.
That message seems to be landing. Hang Ten says it signed a multimillion-dollar contract with one customer within 25 days of the first meeting, something Sikka said he had never seen in enterprise sales. The company is now working with existing customers and late-stage prospects across 21 major enterprises, with deals ranging from seven figures to eight figures. Its customers include Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy, and they span the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
The startup is also squarely in the middle of a fight with old-line systems integrators and newer AI players. Sikka says Hang Ten’s advantage is not a new model, but its ability to adapt AI to messy enterprise software projects. CTO Sanjay Rajagopalan said the team uses an in-house framework called Hobie to package reusable AI skills for regulated industries, and that some jobs that once needed about 30 people can now be handled by two to four. Customers or third parties still do the final quality checks and certification.
Hang Ten, based in Palo Alto, says it has about 20 to 25 employees across the U.S., the Middle East, and Australia, and plans to hire in Europe and India. It’s using the new money to expand engineering, consulting, and sales. And despite acquisition offers from what Sikka called “very big companies,” the startup is staying put for now.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Enterprise AI is increasingly looking less like model worship and more like a services business with better buzzwords, which is exactly why old consulting firms should be sweating. Hang Ten’s real edge is speed and packaging, not magic. That’s a lot more boring than the hype, and probably a lot more useful.
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