Founded by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, Hang Ten Systems has once again completed a seed round of financing just 4 months after its establishment. The company stated to TechCrunch that the amount of this latest round of financing is 53 million US dollars, and it has only been 5 weeks since the completion of the previous 32 million US dollar seed round, bringing the total financing amount to 85 million US dollars.
Xora Leading the Additional Financing Round
This new funding was led by Temasek's early-stage investment platform Xora. Mayfield, which previously led the Series A financing, continued to participate in this round as well. Other participants include Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Chen Liwu, Micron's CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, as well as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Jerry Yang is also currently serving on the board of directors of Hang Ten.
Hang Ten was established in May of this year, with its headquarters located in Palo Alto. The company is betting that AI will change the way large enterprises build and maintain software, targeting corporations with annual revenues exceeding $10 billion. In addition to providing AI strategic consulting, Hang Ten is also directly involved in software development and system modernization initiatives.
The customer has covered 21 large enterprises.
Sikka indicates that the company is currently advancing cooperation with 21 large corporate clients or potential future clients, and some projects have entered the proposal or contract negotiation phase. The clients are distributed across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy.
He stated that the company has already signed several seven-figure contracts and is pursuing eight-figure deals. According to him, Hang Ten managed to sign a multi-million-dollar contract for the construction of a critical business system within 25 days of first contacting a client.
Hang Ten believes that AI is shifting the focus of software development from "writing code" to "defining requirements" and "verifying whether the system is running as expected." The company's Chief Technology Officer, Sanjay Rajagopalan, stated that the team uses an internal framework, Hobie, to encapsulate reusable AI capabilities for use in regulated industries and complex enterprise software projects.
New funds will be used to expand the team.
The company stated that the new funds will be primarily used to expand its engineering, consulting, and sales teams. Hang Ten currently has around 20 to 25 employees in the United States, the Middle East, and Australia, and plans to hire more in Europe and India in the future.
This company is entering a highly competitive market. On one hand, model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are expanding their corporate services; on the other hand, traditional consulting firms and system integrators are also accelerating the integration of generative AI into their existing businesses. Hang Ten's approach is not to develop its own base models, but rather to help large enterprises integrate AI into complex software development processes.
Sikka also revealed that just a few months after the company was established, it had received acquisition offers from "large corporations," but it has chosen to reject them for now in order to prioritize business expansion. Before founding Hang Ten, Sikka co-founded the company AI in 2019 with VianAI. The company received $50 million in seed funding in its early stages and completed a $140 million financing round in 2021, led by SoftBank Vision Fund II.
