Dive Brief:
- Professional services firm Hang Ten Systems closed a $32 million funding round with the support of venture capital firms Mayfield and Aramco Ventures, according to a Wednesday announcement.
- Hang Ten Systems promises to build and manage commercial software with the help of agentic AI, leaning on talent and playbooks focused on the enterprise segment. The firm counts Fresenius and Siemens Energy among its clients. Former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka is the co-founder and CEO of the company.
- “AI code generation has materially cut the marginal cost and timeframe for building advanced enterprise capabilities,” Sikka wrote in a blog post. “Hang Ten offers a different operating model — software built, changed, and run at a fraction of the cost and time, on a continuous basis — with specialized capabilities in enterprise transformations, finance, HR, and new product development, supported by an expert FDE Bench, re-usable skills library, and agentic code generation.”
Dive Insight:
Sikka, who led Infosys from 2014 to 2017, and most recently ran an AI-based business analytics firm, offered a familiar pitch: most enterprises are not seeing benefits from the heaps of money they are forking over for AI transformation.
Hang Ten will tackle software development and management, where AI promises opportunities for businesses to ditch off-the-shelf solutions for bespoke applications built in-house. In particular, outsourced development shops see AI as an accelerant. An AI-native model will allow Hang Ten’s growth to outpace its headcount, Mayfield told TechCrunch in a statement.
“Hang Ten is built so its leverage grows with every project,” said Mayfield, an early stage VC investor.
In addition to software development, Hang Ten will specialize in HR, finance and SAP migrations.
Mayfield describes the startup as providing an “agentic SAP managed service” on its website.
Hang Ten’s leadership team are SAP expats who bring deep experience with the software vendor to the professional services firm. Sikka served as CTO at SAP, where he architected SAP HANA in-memory database. CTO Navid Budhiraja was CTO of SAP acquisition Success Factors.
“We backed Vishal from inception because he has done this before running products and technology at SAP and leading Infosys as CEO. Within a few years, the gap between enterprises that use AI to real advantage and those that don't will define entire industries,” Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha said in the announcement.
