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The enterprise technology landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift, and few people are better positioned to lead that change than Vishal Sikka. The former Chief Executive Officer of Infosys, one of India’s largest IT services firms, has launched Hang Ten Systems — a Bay Area-based startup that seeks to redefine how large organizations build, modify, and operate software in the age of artificial intelligence.
A New Model for a New Era
For decades, the IT services industry has operated on a straightforward premise: enterprises outsource complex technology tasks to firms that deliver them through large teams of skilled professionals. Value scaled with headcount. Margins depended on volume. Hang Ten Systems challenges that premise at its foundation. Rather than deploying more people to deliver more output, the startup harnesses agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and deep domain expertise to build an engine whose efficiency compounds with every project it completes.
Sikka has been candid about the urgency behind this vision. In his launch post on X, he described the current moment as one where AI has arrived “like a massive new wave,” adding that the right response is not merely to adapt but to master it entirely — “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.” The name of the startup, in that sense, is not a branding exercise but a statement of intent.
The Team and the Backing
Sikka has assembled a founding team drawn from years of shared experience across SAP, Infosys, and his previous enterprise AI venture, VianAI. Co-founders include Navin Budhiraja as Chief Technology Officer, Sanjay Rajagopalan as Chief Design Officer, and Tao Liu as Senior Vice President of Forward Deployed Engineering. The startup has raised $32 million in seed funding, led by Mayfield — whose managing partner Navin Chaddha shares a Stanford connection with Sikka — and supported by a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures, the venturing arm of Saudi Aramco. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, another Stanford contemporary of Sikka, serves on the company’s board.
Already Delivering
Notably, Hang Ten Systems arrived at its public launch with customers already in place. Global enterprises including Fresenius and Siemens Energy are among its early engagements. Sikka has spoken of a clear gap he has witnessed firsthand — between those who instinctively know how to deploy AI and achieve dramatic results, and “the far greater number who get none of it, and who often end up causing harm instead.” Bridging that gap, he says, is the founding purpose of Hang Ten Systems.
The Larger Debate
Hang Ten’s emergence coincides with a broader industry reckoning. Analysts at Jefferies have argued that IT services may be among the first sectors to face meaningful AI disruption. Infosys, however, has projected that AI-first services could represent a $300 to $400 billion opportunity by 2030, even as its share price has declined over 35 percent this year.
Sikka’s answer, it seems, is to stop debating the wave and start riding it.
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