Former Infosys Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka has returned to the startup world with the launch of Hang Ten Systems, an enterprise artificial intelligence company that has secured $32 million in seed funding.
The funding will be used to expand the company's engineering team and accelerate deployments with global enterprise customers, as businesses increasingly look to integrate AI into their operations.
Hang Ten Systems is led by Sikka, who previously served as CEO of Infosys and earlier headed products and technology at SAP. The company aims to help large enterprises move beyond AI experimentation and generate measurable business outcomes.
According to the company, many organisations are investing in AI but struggle to translate those investments into productivity gains while taking on additional cost and operational risk. Hang Ten says it aims to bridge that gap by helping enterprises build, modify and operate business software using generative AI at a fraction of the traditional cost and time.
The startup focuses on enterprise software used across finance, human resources, product development and large-scale business transformation. Its platform combines agentic AI-powered code generation, reusable software capabilities and specialised engineering expertise to modernise enterprise applications.
Announcing the launch in a LinkedIn post, Sikka compared the emergence of artificial intelligence to "a massive new wave" that businesses must learn to ride.
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"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," he wrote.
Sikka said Hang Ten is already working with several large global enterprises, including Fresenius and Siemens Energy, to help them deploy AI across their businesses.
"Our dream is to help enterprises not just transform with AI, but use it as a force to do what no one could do before," he said.
The funding round was led by Mayfield and also includes participation from Aramco Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, along with a group of Silicon Valley angel investors. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has also joined the company's board.
Sikka said the company has been built alongside a leadership team he has worked with for years, including Navin Budhiraja, Sanjay Rajagopalan, Tao Liu, Frank Yu, Pradeep K.P. and Yusuf Safdari.
Reflecting on the opportunity presented by AI, Sikka said he has witnessed firsthand how the technology can compress years of work into minutes for organisations that know how to deploy it effectively.
"I have seen, firsthand, the dramatic things AI delivers for the people and teams who somehow just know what to do with it. And I have seen the far greater number who get none of it, and who often end up causing harm instead. In that gap lies the biggest opportunity of our time," he said.
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