The name alone—Hang Ten Systems—raises eyebrows. It's the kind of California-casual branding you might not expect from a former Infosys CEO launching what he bills as the future of enterprise software delivery. And yet there was Vishal Sikka on June 24, 2026, with Mayfield announcing a $32 million seed round it led for a startup promising to do what incumbents like his old employer have spent decades perfecting: helping big companies build and run critical software. Only this time, he says, AI will do most of the heavy lifting.
Mayfield led the financing, with Aramco Ventures coming in as a strategic backer alongside a handful of angel investors who preferred to stay unnamed. The Palo Alto-based company has already lined up early customers—Fresenius, the German healthcare giant, among them, plus at least one arm of the sprawling Siemens conglomerate. Not a bad opening act for a firm emerging from stealth.
The Same Promise, Different Wrapping
Strip away the buzzwords and Hang Ten's pitch sounds awfully familiar: enterprises will be transformed by AI, but most don't know how to pull it off themselves. Sikka frames his new venture as the bridge across that gap, offering what he calls an "AI-native operating model" that layers agentic code generation atop reusable skills libraries and teams of engineers embedded directly with clients.
"We are building Hang Ten to close that gap, and help enterprises ride the AI wave," Sikka said in the announcement. The phrasing is predictably upbeat. Whether the execution proves different from traditional consulting—where armies of junior developers bill by the hour—remains the open question.
The company is targeting finance, HR, and new product development, the kinds of enterprise transformations that have kept firms like Accenture and Deloitte flush for years. Sikka's argument is essentially that AI can collapse timelines and costs. If he's right, the implications ripple well beyond one startup's fortunes.
A Founder With History
Sikka brings credentials, certainly. Before his rocky three-year stint running Infosys—a tenure that ended in 2017 amid public disputes with the company's founders—he spent years on SAP's executive board as its chief technology officer. More recently, he launched Vianai Systems, which pulled in a $50 million seed in 2019 and another $140 million from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 two years later. He also sits on the boards of BMW and GSK, positions that suggest he's maintained the kind of corporate relationships Hang Ten will need.
Then there's the curious matter of the company's name. Oracle's 2020 proxy filing revealed a three-month consulting deal with something called "Hang Ten Systems LLC," an entity wholly owned by Sikka, shortly before he joined Oracle's board. Whether the 2026 startup represents a continuation of that entity or is a new corporate structure reusing the name isn't clear from public disclosures. Perhaps it doesn't matter. But it's the kind of detail that makes you wonder.
The Cast and the Capital
Jerry Yang, who co-founded Yahoo in an era when that meant something, joined Hang Ten's board. The initial leadership includes Navin Budhiraja as CTO, Sanjay Rajagopalan carrying the title Chief Design Officer, and Tao Liu heading up what the company calls "Forward Deployed Engineering"—a nod to Palantir's model of embedding technical staff inside client organizations.
Mayfield's Navin Chaddha said his firm backed Sikka "from inception," framing the investment as a bet on a coming divide. "Within a few years, the gap between enterprises that use AI to real advantage and those that don't will define entire industries," he said. It's the kind of statement venture capitalists make when they want to sound visionary, though the underlying logic isn't wrong.
Aramco Ventures CEO Mahdi Aladel offered his own take, calling enterprise-scale AI deployment "the biggest challenge and opportunity of our time." Strategic investors tend to say such things, of course. Whether Aramco brings meaningful distribution or just capital remains to be seen.
Timing and Tension
The announcement landed during an unusually introspective moment for the IT services industry. Days earlier, Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani had sized the AI-first services opportunity at somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion by 2030, arguing the technology would amplify incumbents rather than wipe them out. Jefferies analysts, meanwhile, have floated IT services as a sector ripe for AI-driven disruption. Someone's thesis will prove right.
Hang Ten's early customer list offers a data point, albeit with a minor wrinkle. Different versions of the announcement referenced different Siemens entities—with some materials naming Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and including a quote from CEO Vinod Philip about "several strategic initiatives" underway, while others cited Siemens Energy instead. Both are legitimate entities within the Siemens empire, though the inconsistency suggests either multiple parallel relationships or some confusion in the messaging rollout.
What Comes Next
The funding will go toward hiring across delivery, engineering, sales, and senior leadership, according to the company. Roles are being posted from the Bay Area, though Hang Ten hasn't disclosed current headcount or whether it plans to open offices elsewhere. That's typical for a seed-stage outfit, even one with a high-profile founder.
The underlying wager is clean enough: traditional IT services firms are lumbering incumbents with legacy delivery models, and an AI-native challenger can peel away work before those giants fully adapt. But incumbents have client relationships that span decades, delivery infrastructure built over years, and balance sheets that can sustain margin pressure. Hang Ten has $32 million, a handful of early customers, and a founder with something to prove.
Whether that's enough will become clear soon enough. The IT services market doesn't move slowly once momentum shifts.
