The round
Hang Ten Systems, the enterprise AI company founded by former Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, has raised another $53m, bringing its total funding to $85m, it said on 16 September. The round was led by Xora, a fund backed by Singapore’s Temasek, with Mayfield, which led the company’s first round, and Aramco Ventures also investing.
Individual backers include Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who joins the board. TechCrunch reports that the new money counts as an extension of the company’s seed funding.
What Hang Ten does
The company provides AI services to large businesses, using agents that generate code, libraries of reusable skills and domain expertise. It applies them to software development, finance analytics, system migrations and HR. It names Aramco and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy as customers and says several other global companies have signed multi-million-dollar contracts.
Sikka’s argument is that writing software is no longer the constraint. “The build part itself has basically become close to zero marginal cost, close to zero time,” Sikka told TechCrunch.
“AI can be the most powerful amplifier we have ever built. But in the enterprise, AI’s power must go hand-in-hand with reliability,” Sikka said in the announcement.
Phil Inagaki of Xora made the same point from the investor’s side: “The bottleneck is implementation: deploying it securely, economically and at speed.”
Why it matters
Hang Ten sells AI as a finished service rather than as tools a company’s own staff must assemble, the kind of work IT services firms such as Infosys, which Sikka once ran, have long done for large clients. The raise comes about four months after the company was founded, according to TechCrunch. How quickly its named customers expand their contracts will show whether the approach scales.
