Ex-Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka’s New AI Venture Hang Ten Bags $32 Mn

Former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka’s new AI venture Hang Ten Systems has raised $32 Mn (₹302 Cr) in its seed funding round led by private equity (PE) giant Mayfield Ventures.

The round also saw participation from Aramco Ventures, the VC arm of oil giant Aramco, and a group of angel investors. The startup plans to utilise the fresh funds to build its team and expand its work with global enterprises.

Sikka announced the new startup in a post on X, adding that the platform is already working with Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius on AI-native project delivery. 

In an official statement, the startup called itself an enterprise AI services company that helps large enterprises adopt AI. It aims to leverage agentic code generation and a reusable skills library to help companies build and run SaaS tools.

“Hang Ten offers a different operating model – software built, changed, and run at a fraction of the cost and time, on a continuous basis – with specialised capabilities in enterprise transformations, finance, HR, and new product development, supported by an expert FDE (forward deployed engineer) bench, re-usable skills library, and agentic code generation,” the startup said. 

Elaborating further, Sikka said that his new venture brings together frontier AI expertise, decades of expertise and “the judgment to deliver real value when everything is changing at once”. 

“AI is upon us all like a massive new wave. And I learned a long time ago that when there are big waves around, it is time to surf. Not just to surf, but to hang ten — to master the wave so well that you can walk all the way to the front of the board and hang your ten toes off the front,” said Sikka about the reasoning behind the startup’s name in the social media post.

It has also onboarded former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang as a member on its board. Hang Ten currently operates with a 16-member team, including ex-ANSYS executive Navin Budhiraja, Sanjay Rajagopalan, Tao Liu, Frank Yu, Pradeep Panicker and Yusuf Safdari.

An alumnus of Stanford University, Sikka took over as the CEO and managing director of Infosys in 2015, the first non-founder CEO of the IT giant. However, he unceremoniously quit the company in 2018 amid reports of a rift between him and cofounder Narayana Murthy. 

A year later in 2019, he founded Palo Alto-based GenAI startup Vianai Systems, which caters to enterprise AI use cases. He continues in his role as the founder and CEO at the startup.

The fundraise comes amid growing demand for enterprise AI solutions, driven by the rising need for efficiency, productivity, workflow optimisation, automation, tailored solutions and sovereignty mandates. At the heart of all this is the Indian GenAI ecosystem, which is projected to become a $126 Bn opportunity by 2030.

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