Former Infosys chief’s AI startup nabs another $53M — SkimNews
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- Hang Ten Systems added $53 million to its seed funding five weeks after closing its initial $32 million round, bringing total seed capital to $85 million, with Xora (Temasek's early-stage arm) leading and Mayfield, Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang participating.
- Vishal Sikka told TechCrunch Hang Ten signed a multimillion-dollar mission-critical software contract within 25 days of a first meeting with one customer — "the fastest" enterprise deal he has seen — and the startup has won multiple seven-figure contracts while pursuing eight-figure deals across 21 major enterprises including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy.
- CTO Sanjay Rajagopalan said Hang Ten engineers rely on an in-house framework called Hobie that packages reusable AI "skills" for regulated industries, and that teams of two to four people can now handle projects that previously required about 30, with the startup promising customers a 10-fold improvement in cost, speed, or both.
- Sikka said Hang Ten has already received acquisition offers from "very big companies" but turned them down to focus on growth; the Palo Alto-based startup has 20–25 employees across the U.S., the Middle East, and Australia and plans to hire in Europe and India.
- Hang Ten explicitly positions itself as a platform-independent alternative to both AI model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic and traditional systems integrators — Sikka said "more than half" of current opportunities are net-new projects companies had previously shelved rather than work displaced from incumbent vendors.
Why it matters: Hang Ten's $53 million top-up just five weeks after its initial seed — and a multimillion-dollar enterprise contract signed within 25 days of first contact — signals that large enterprises are buying AI-native software services at a pace Sikka himself calls unprecedented; the startup's two-to-four-person delivery model and 10x cost/speed pitch put it in direct competition with both the systems-integrator incumbents (including Sikka's former employer Infosys) and the model developers expanding enterprise offerings.
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