Vishal Sikka, the former CEO of Indian IT giant Infosys, just launched a startup built on a bold premise: AI can do much of the work that companies have paid IT services firms billions to handle. According to TechCrunch AI, his new venture, Hang Ten Systems, has raised a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and a roster of angel investors. The round was announced Wednesday, and the company’s board already includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.
This is significant because Sikka is aiming squarely at the industry that made him. For decades, firms like Infosys, Accenture, and Tata grew by letting enterprises outsource the grind of customizing, integrating, and maintaining software. Hang Ten wants to automate that grind with AI instead.
What Hang Ten actually does
The Bay Area startup describes itself as an enterprise AI services company. As TechCrunch AI reports, it helps large companies continuously build, modify, and operate software using AI-driven development and automation. The model rests on three pillars:
- Agentic code generation that writes and updates software with minimal human hands
- Reusable AI “skills” that carry across projects
- Deep domain expertise from Sikka’s longtime team
That team is no accident. Sikka spent 12 years building enterprise software at SAP and later sat on Oracle’s board. His co-founders, including CTO Navin Budhiraja, chief design officer Sanjay Rajagopalan, and forward-deployed engineering lead Tao Liu, have worked with him across SAP, Infosys, and his earlier AI startup VianAI.
Despite launching only a month ago, Hang Ten already has paying customers. Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch the company “just got started a month back” and is working with names like Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius on AI-native project delivery.
Why investors are paying attention
The pitch comes down to economics. Traditional IT services scale with headcount: more projects mean more people. Mayfield argues Hang Ten breaks that link.
“Traditional services scale linearly with headcount,” the firm said. “Hang Ten is built so its leverage grows with every project.”
What stands out here is the timing. Sikka isn’t a newcomer chasing a trend. He’s an industry insider betting against the playbook he once ran, and he’s doing it with a team that knows enterprise software from the inside.
The bigger fight over IT services
Hang Ten lands in the middle of a heated debate about whether AI grows the IT services market or guts it. Analysts at Jefferies argued earlier this year that IT services could be among the first sectors to feel real AI disruption. The numbers back the nervousness: Infosys shares are down more than 35% this year.
The incumbents are pushing the optimistic case. Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani said this week that AI could expand the industry’s addressable market, and Infosys told investors that “AI-first services” could be a $300 billion to $400 billion market by 2030. Many of these firms are partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI to adapt.
So there are two competing stories. One says AI is a new tool that lets services firms sell more. The other says AI rewires how enterprise software gets built, maintained, and delivered, and the old model shrinks. Sikka is clearly placing his chips on the second.
What to watch next
For practitioners and enterprise buyers, Hang Ten is an early test of whether an AI-native services firm can deliver at the scale incumbents promise. A few things worth tracking:
- Whether early customers like Siemens Gamesa and Fresenius expand their contracts
- How fast Hang Ten hires across delivery, engineering, and sales as it expands globally
- Whether legacy firms respond by buying AI-native challengers or building their own
Sikka, now 59, framed the moment in his launch blog post, saying Hang Ten is helping enterprises “hang ten on the biggest wave of our lifetimes.” Whether that wave lifts the incumbents or washes them out is the question this funding round just made harder to ignore. You can find the full details at the original source.