Hang Ten Systems Launches With $32M Seed to Upend IT Services

Vishal Sikka spent 12 years at SAP and served as CEO of Infosys before founding the enterprise AI startup VianAI in 2019. Now, according to TechCrunch, he is launching a new Bay Area startup called Hang Ten Systems with a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield and strategic backing from Aramco Ventures. The company's thesis is a direct challenge to how IT services has worked for decades: traditional services firms scale revenue linearly with headcount, and Hang Ten is built so its leverage grows with every project instead.

The company helps enterprises continuously build, modify, and operate software using agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and domain expertise. Early customers include Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius -- notable given that Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha reportedly said the company had "just got started a month back" and was already signing clients.

Sikka's co-founders include Navin Budhiraja as CTO, Sanjay Rajagopalan as Chief Design Officer, and Tao Liu as Senior VP of Forward Deployed Engineering, drawing from their shared history across SAP, Infosys, and VianAI. That prior startup raised $50 million in seed funding in 2019 and $140 million in a follow-on round in 2021. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang joined the Hang Ten board.

The honest caveat is that "leverage grows with every project" is the founding claim, not a demonstrated result. What the reporting does not give you is detail on what Siemens Gamesa and Fresenius are actually doing with the platform, or how Hang Ten's reusable AI skills architecture differs in practice from the AI-augmented tooling that incumbent IT firms are already deploying. VianAI's trajectory is another open question -- that prior company raised substantial capital with limited public visibility into outcomes.

For enterprises locked into headcount-scaled consulting contracts, the scenario Hang Ten is betting on is worth watching. Aramco Ventures' strategic backing points toward energy as an early test case for whether the compound leverage model can actually close deals at scale.