Vishal Sikka Returns with an Audacious Bet
Vishal Sikka, the former CEO of Infosys who transformed India’s second-largest IT company during his tenure from 2014 to 2017, has raised $32 million in seed funding for his new artificial intelligence startup, Hang Ten Systems. The round was led by Mayfield with strategic backing from Aramco Ventures.
The startup’s ambition is to fundamentally change how large enterprises build, modify, and operate their software systems — a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually and currently served by an army of human consultants, outsourcing firms, and systems integrators.
The Problem Hang Ten Is Solving
Enterprise software is expensive, slow to change, and deeply fragile. Large organisations — banks, hospitals, manufacturers, government agencies — run on systems that took decades and billions to build, and that are nearly impossible to modify without breaking something else.
Sikka’s thesis is that AI agents can now handle the continuous building, testing, modifying, and operating of complex software systems in a way that was simply not possible before large language models existed. Hang Ten is essentially betting that AI will automate a significant portion of what traditional IT services firms do today.
Why This Matters for India
India’s IT services industry — Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL — is a $200+ billion sector that employs over 5 million people. If AI genuinely automates significant portions of software development and maintenance, the implications for India’s dominant export industry are profound.
Sikka knows this territory better than almost anyone. During his time at Infosys, he pushed hard for AI-led automation — a vision that put him ahead of his time and, some argued, contributed to tensions with the board and founders that eventually led to his departure.
His return to this specific problem — armed with better AI tools, significant funding, and years of reflection — is being watched closely in both Silicon Valley and Indian tech circles.
The Competitive Landscape
Hang Ten is entering a crowded space. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Devin (from Cognition AI) are already changing how individual developers write code. The enterprise market, however, requires more than just code completion — it needs understanding of complex legacy systems, integration with business processes, and enterprise-grade security and compliance.
Sikka’s competitive advantage lies in his unique combination of deep enterprise experience, AI research background, and the credibility to open doors in the boardrooms of the world’s largest companies.
