Vishal Sikka’s AI Startup Hang Ten Raises $53 Million in Second Seed Round

Hang Ten Systems, an enterprise artificial intelligence startup founded four months ago by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, has expanded its seed funding by an additional $53 million. The latest financing round closed just five weeks after the company secured an initial $32 million seed round, bringing its total capital raised to $85 million. Temasek early-stage investment platform Xora led the new financing, with participation from Mayfield, Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Hang Ten targets enterprises generating more than $10 billion in annual revenue, offering AI strategy consulting and software modernization services. The startup's founding thesis is that artificial intelligence reduces the marginal cost and time of writing code to near zero, shifting software development from manual coding to defining requirements and validating system performance.

The startup's go-to-market strategy has yielded swift enterprise contracts. Sikka reported that Hang Ten signed a multimillion-dollar contract to build a mission-critical software system within 25 days of its initial client meeting. The firm is currently engaged with 21 major enterprises across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy.

These early wins attracted the attention of Temasek platform Xora, which initiated investment talks to connect Hang Ten with other entities in the sovereign wealth fund's portfolio. While declining to disclose the startup's current valuation, Sikka confirmed that the second seed round represented a valuation bump. The company plans to deploy the capital to expand its engineering, consulting, and sales operations across North America, the Middle East, Australia, Europe, and India.

Unlike foundational model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, Hang Ten positions itself as an independent platform-agnostic partner focused on tailoring AI to complex corporate engineering pipelines. Co-founder and chief design officer Sanjay Rajagopalan stated that engineers utilize an in-house framework named Hobie, which packages reusable AI skills for regulated industries and large-scale software projects.

"We are actually delivering production software," Rajagopalan said. "It's not like we are doing some kind of PoC."

The startup's operational efficiency has enabled teams of two to four people to execute projects that historically required approximately 30 engineers, while final quality assurance and certification remain handled by customers or independent third parties. This model positions Hang Ten in direct competition with traditional systems integrators, with the startup frequently replacing incumbent vendors or capturing postponed internal projects.

Despite operating for only four months, Hang Ten has already rejected serious acquisition overtures from major technology corporations to maintain its independent expansion trajectory. Sikka previously co-founded enterprise AI startup VianAI in 2019 following his departure from Infosys in 2017. VianAI raised $50 million in seed financing and a subsequent $140 million round in 2021 led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 before Sikka departed in April.

Reflecting on the competitive dynamics against legacy outsourcing giants, Sikka noted that new market entrants operate without legacy transformation burdens. The startup derives its name from the surfing maneuver of riding with all ten toes over the front of the board, symbolizing an effort to help enterprises navigate the ongoing technology transition.