Enterprise artificial intelligence services startup Hang Ten Systems Inc. today announced it has raised $53 million in a second seed round, less than three months after announcing its first.
Hang Ten provides advisory, transformation and applied AI services, and its customers are large enterprises trying to get AI working inside their businesses. The delivery model is built on agentic code generation and a reusable library of skills, with domain experts rounding it out. Hang Ten says that setup lets it build, change and run enterprise software well under the cost and timeline of a traditional systems integrator. Projects so far have covered software development, finance analytics and human resources, among other areas.
Founder and Chief Executive Vishal Sikka told TechCrunch that the “build part itself has basically become close to zero marginal cost, close to zero time.”
Hang Ten said the two rounds closed five weeks apart, and several contracts worth millions of dollars each were signed with global enterprises in that window. Some of those engagements are multiyear development programs. Work on a few is already finished. According to TechCrunch, Hang Ten’s customers and late-stage prospects add up to 21 large enterprises, and one of them signed a multimillion-dollar deal within 25 days of the first meeting.
The company is building applications for several functions at Saudi Arabian Oil Co., one of two customers named in the announcement. Siemens Energy AG’s wind unit Siemens Gamesa is the other. The wind turbine maker brought Hang Ten in two months ago with a short list of outcomes it needed proven. Chief Executive Vinod Philip said the startup delivered “with a quality and speed that genuinely impressed us,” and the scope of the work has since been widened.
The new capital will pay for delivery capacity on current engagements and a bigger engineering and consulting organization. Some of it goes to the platform, infrastructure and skills library. Hang Ten employs 20 to 25 people across the U.S., the Middle East and Australia, and plans to hire in Europe and India.
Sikka was chief executive of Indian IT services company Infosys Ltd. between 2014 and 2017. Prior to that he worked at SAP SE. After leaving Infosys, he co-founded Vianai Systems Inc. in 2019, which he left in April this year to found Hang Ten.
AI “can be the most powerful amplifier we have ever built,” Sikka said in the funding announcement, adding that in the enterprise that power has to go hand in hand with reliability.
Xora Innovation Pte. Ltd., an early-stage investment platform backed by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings (Private) Ltd., led the new round. Mayfield, which led the $32 million first round, came back for this one along with Aramco Ventures. Individual backers include Intel Corp. Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan, Micron Technology Inc. Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Yang, a founding partner at AME Cloud Ventures, has joined the board.
Phil Inagaki, managing partner and chief investment officer at Xora, said the bottleneck in enterprise AI is implementation, which means deploying it “securely, economically and at speed.” He added that Xora sees the same urgency in Singapore and across the region.
Aramco Ventures Chief Executive Mahdi Aladel said the more closely his team looks at Hang Ten’s approach, “the more functions and use cases we find across our own operations where it would fit.” Projects at Aramco are already being scoped.
Investors have now put $85 million into the company across its two seed rounds.
