AI
Vishal Sikka Raised 53 Million Dollars on a Radical Idea: Building Software Now Costs Close to Zero
Hang Ten Systems, an AI startup founded by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka just four months ago, has expanded its seed funding by another $53 million, TechCrunch reported on September 16. The round closed only five weeks after the initial $32 million seed, bringing the company's total funding to $85 million. The fresh investment was led by Xora, the early stage investment platform of Temasek, with Mayfield, which led the earlier round, also participating.
The investor list reads like a roll call of people who build the world's computing infrastructure. Alongside Xora and Mayfield, the round includes Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, who sits on the company's board. When the chief executives of the two companies that make the chips join your seed round, the thesis has clearly traveled beyond venture capital.
The thesis is Sikka's central claim about where software economics now stand. He told TechCrunch that the build part of software has become close to zero marginal cost and close to zero time, arguing that AI shifts the focus of software development from writing code to defining requirements and validating that systems perform as intended. The company's own site puts the same idea in marketing language: with agentic AI, the cost of building software is falling toward zero, and the marginal cost of custom software sits near $0.
The customer evidence is unusually concrete for a four month old company. Within 25 days of the first meeting with one customer, Hang Ten signed a multimillion dollar contract to build a mission critical software system, and Sikka said enterprise deals had moved at a pace beyond anything in his experience. The startup now works with 21 major enterprises as customers or late stage prospects, has secured multiple contracts worth seven figures, and is pursuing deals worth eight figures. Named customers span the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy.
The delivery model explains the speed. Hang Ten's engineers work through an in house agentic AI platform called Hobie, a five layer system that reads a customer's live systems, models the business, and runs queries in place, with governance and audit tracing built in. Sikka says teams of two to four people now handle projects that previously required around 30, and the company promises customers a 10 fold improvement in cost, speed, or a combination of the two. The pitch to large companies, typically those with more than $10 billion in annual revenue, is outcome based pricing: the price is agreed against a defined result before work starts.
Perhaps the most telling detail is what Sikka turned down. He told TechCrunch the company has already received serious acquisition offers from very big companies and declined them to keep building. Sikka previously cofounded the enterprise AI startup VianAI in 2019 after leaving Infosys in 2017, a company that raised $50 million in seed funding and later $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The new company's name comes from 'hang ten,' the surfing maneuver of riding with all ten toes over the front of the board, which Sikka calls the biggest wave of our lives.
For enterprise technology watchers, the signal is in the customer pipeline. Sikka says more than half of the company's current opportunities involve new projects that companies had previously put off, work that stayed on the shelf because the economics stayed out of reach. When building software costs close to zero, the backlog becomes the market. The companies that spent years deferring transformation now have a reason to begin, and Hang Ten is selling them the first ride.
Sources
New to crypto? Read the crypto glossary, browse frequent questions, read our story, or explore the story archive.