Ex-Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Bets AI Can Replace the IT Services Model — Raises $32M

For two decades, the Indian IT story was built on a simple promise: hand over the grunt work of building, integrating, and maintaining enterprise software, and an army of engineers in Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad would do it cheaper and faster. Vishal Sikka helped run the firm that came to define that model. Now he is betting that AI can do much of that work instead — and he is building a startup to prove it.

The former Infosys CEO has launched Hang Ten Systems, a Bay Area enterprise-AI services company that has raised a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and participation from angel investors. The startup’s board includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Its pitch: help enterprises continuously build, modify, and operate software using AI-driven development and automation, rather than the headcount-heavy delivery teams the industry has long relied on.

A founder pointed at the industry he once led

The framing is hard to miss. Infosys is among the largest IT services firms in India, and Sikka ran it until he stepped down in 2017. Hang Ten’s thesis — that agentic code generation and reusable AI skills can compress the labour at the heart of software delivery — lands squarely on the economics that built India’s outsourcing boom.

Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch the company “just got started a month back” and already has paying customers. The firm backed Hang Ten on Sikka’s track record and on a belief that an AI-native model scales differently from a traditional services shop.

“Traditional services scale linearly with headcount. Hang Ten is built so its leverage grows with every project.”
— Mayfield

The early team is stacked with people who have worked with Sikka for years across SAP, Infosys, and his previous enterprise-AI venture, VianAI — including CTO Navin Budhiraja, chief design officer Sanjay Rajagopalan, and Tao Liu, SVP of forward-deployed engineering. Headquartered in the Bay Area, Hang Ten says it is hiring across delivery, engineering, sales, and leadership, with plans to expand globally.

Not VianAI, by design

This is Sikka’s second swing at enterprise AI. After leaving Infosys, he founded VianAI, which emerged from stealth in 2019 with $50 million in seed funding and later raised $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Chaddha was careful to draw a line between the two: VianAI focused on enterprise AI applications and analytics for decision-making, while Hang Ten describes itself as an AI services company built around agentic code generation, reusable skills, and domain expertise.

The debate Hang Ten is walking into

The launch lands in the middle of an unresolved argument about what AI does to the IT services business. Analysts at Jefferies argued earlier this year that IT services may be among the first sectors to face meaningful AI disruption. The incumbents are pushing the opposite read: Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani said this week that AI could expand the industry’s addressable market, with the company telling investors that “AI-first services” could represent a $300 billion to $400 billion opportunity by 2030.

Both things can be partly true — a bigger market that also rewards a very different cost structure. That is the gap Hang Ten is built to exploit. And the incumbents are not standing still: Infosys has moved to adapt through AI partnerships with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI over the past few months.

Why it matters for India

For India’s services majors, Sikka’s move is less a competitive threat at $32 million in scale than a signal about where capital and talent think the model is heading. The country’s IT sector employs millions and remains a pillar of the export economy; a credible AI-native challenger fronted by a former Infosys CEO sharpens an uncomfortable question the industry has mostly answered with optimism. The markets are less convinced — with Infosys shares off more than a third this year, investors are already repricing the bull case. Whether Hang Ten becomes a real challenger or a well-funded proof of concept, it makes the disruption debate concrete instead of theoretical.