A Palo Alto startup founded by a former Infosys chief executive says it can do the work of a 30-person enterprise software team with just two to four senior engineers — and investors are now betting $85 million that it's right. Hang Ten Systems has closed a second seed round of $53 million led by Temasek-backed venture firm Xora Innovation, bringing its total funding to $85 million in just five weeks, according to the company's own announcement.
The round, first reported by TechCrunch and later covered by Unite.AI, drew participation from Aramco Ventures and Mayfield, along with individual investors including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who is also joining Hang Ten's board of directors. The company was co-founded by Vishal Sikka, who previously served as an executive board member at SAP overseeing all products and technology before becoming CEO of Infosys. Hang Ten provides advisory, transformation, and applied-AI services to large enterprises, working across software development, finance and finance analytics, enterprise migrations, and human resources.
Small Teams, Big Enterprise Bets
The efficiency claim at the center of Hang Ten's pitch is stark: forward-deployed teams of just two to four senior engineers, running the company's AI platform, are executing complex enterprise software projects that traditionally required roughly 30 engineers under legacy IT service models, according to nstartup. Hang Ten delivers through those small, senior forward-deployed teams and prices its work on an outcome basis, agreeing to a defined deliverable before work even starts, per the Unite.AI report.
Sikka reported that more than half of the startup's current project pipeline consists of new software transformations that enterprises had previously postponed due to cost and delivery constraints, rather than work pulled directly from incumbent IT vendors, as detailed by Progressive Robot. That distinction matters for a company positioning itself as a challenge to traditional IT services and systems integrators — it suggests Hang Ten is unlocking stalled demand as much as it is cannibalizing existing contracts held by incumbent firms.
The Hobie Platform's Five Layers
Underpinning the pitch is Hang Ten's proprietary agentic AI platform, called Hobie, which the Unite.AI report describes as built for deterministic performance in regulated industries. Hobie is organized across five layers: Shoreline, a conversational surface with memory and intent routing; Shaper, which builds agents by reading live systems and refining them in a closed loop; Lens, a published, versioned semantic model of the business; Reef, which runs queries against existing systems without copying or migrating data; and Beacon, an audit and governance layer that traces answers back to exact data and model versions.
That architecture is designed to sidestep one of enterprise AI's biggest adoption barriers — data privacy concerns in finance and healthcare — by querying data where it already resides rather than migrating it, per Progressive Robot's account. Hobie also includes fail-closed, role-aware access controls aligned to HIPAA, SOX, and NIST standards, according to the Unite.AI report. The design reflects the technical playbook of Hang Ten's leadership team, including CTO Navin Budhiraja, who leads engineering and platforms; Chief Design Officer Sanjay Rajagopalan, who leads design and applied AI; and Senior VP of Forward Deployed Engineering Tao Liu, all of whom previously worked alongside Sikka across SAP, Infosys, and Sikka's earlier venture Vianai, per Dealroom.
Aramco, Siemens Gamesa Among Early Clients
Hang Ten's client roster already includes some of the world's largest industrial names. The company is working with Aramco on applications supporting operations across several functions, with additional projects already being scoped, and Aramco's Mahdi Aladel said the company's teams are keen to work with Hang Ten, per the Unite.AI report. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy began working with Hang Ten in July and has since widened the scope of that engagement, while Fresenius was also among the enterprises the startup worked with at launch.
As of September, Hang Ten had engaged with 21 major companies, a mix of existing customers and late-stage prospects, while targeting companies with over $10 billion in annual revenue, securing multi-million-dollar contracts while pursuing eight-figure deals, according to a report from Superpower Daily. The startup has reportedly turned down early acquisition proposals in favor of scaling its own delivery model, per Progressive Robot's reporting. Phil Inagaki, cited in the Unite.AI account, said the real bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption isn't the technology itself but implementation — the gap Hang Ten is designed to fill.
Sikka's Long Run in Enterprise Tech
Sikka is no newcomer to enterprise AI bets. He previously launched Vianai Systems in 2019, raising $50 million in seed funding that year and another $140 million in 2021 from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, according to AI Weekly. During his tenure as Infosys CEO from 2014 to 2017, Sikka led the company's decision to become one of the initial institutional donors and supporters of OpenAI when it launched in 2015, per a report from India Today.
Sikka also holds a board seat at Oracle Corporation, appointed in December 2019, along with a position on the supervisory board of BMW Group and an advisory role at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI, according to Oracle's own announcement. Hang Ten had already closed a first seed round of $32 million on June 24, led by Mayfield with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures, before returning five weeks later for the larger $53 million extension.
Betting Against the Billable Hour
Mayfield, which led that first round, manages $3 billion in AI venture capital with 70% invested at inception, and has framed Hang Ten's AI-native architecture as a direct challenge to traditional IT services and systems integrators, according to a report distributed via Business Wire / Enterprise DNA. That model, built on agentic code generation and a reusable skills library, contrasts with the linear headcount-to-revenue math that has long defined traditional systems integration.
Hang Ten says it will put the fresh capital toward delivery capacity, organizational expansion, and continued platform development, expanding its engineering and consulting organization while continuing to build out its agentic skills library, per the Unite.AI announcement. The lead investor behind the new round, Xora Innovation, was established in 2019 as an early-stage deep-tech venture platform backed by Singapore's Temasek Holdings, with deal teams operating out of both Singapore and San Francisco, according to Altss. Whether Hang Ten's small-team model can hold up across the wildly varied tech stacks of Fortune 500 companies over the long haul remains the open question the enterprise software world is now watching.
