Temasek’s Xora Adds $53M to Hang Ten Systems Seed Round
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Hang Ten Systems has added another $53 million to its Seed round, closing the new money just five weeks after its initial $32 million raise. Xora, the early-stage investment platform of Temasek, led the round and brings the company’s total funding to $85 million.
Mayfield, which led the earlier investment, returned. Other backers include Aramco Ventures, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who also sits on the board.
The company was founded in May by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, which makes the pace of this raise notable: four months from founding to $85 million. It is based in Palo Alto, California.
The bet is that AI changes how large companies build and maintain software. Hang Ten advises enterprises, typically those above $10 billion in annual revenue, on AI strategy, and it also builds and modernizes software for them. Sikka has argued that the building itself now costs close to nothing and takes close to no time, which moves the real work of software development toward defining requirements and validating that systems behave as intended.
Customers appear to agree. One signed a multimillion-dollar contract for a mission-critical system within 25 days of the first meeting. Hang Ten is now working with existing customers and late-stage prospects spanning 21 major enterprises, some in proposal or contract negotiation. It has multiple seven-figure contracts and is chasing eight-figure deals. Customers sit across the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and include Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy.
Those early wins are what prompted Xora to approach the company, seeing a chance to introduce it to other Temasek portfolio companies. Sikka did not disclose a valuation but said the second seed round came at a step up.
The new capital will expand engineering, consulting, and sales. The California company currently employs roughly 20 to 25 people across the US, the Middle East, and Australia, with hiring planned in Europe and India.
The market is crowded. Model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic keep pushing further into enterprise work, and traditional consulting firms are embedding generative AI into their own services. Sikka’s counterargument is that enterprises still want partners independent of the underlying platform who work solely in the enterprise’s interest.
The company says its edge comes from adapting AI to the messy software development processes inside large organizations rather than building another model. Co-founder and chief design officer Sanjay Rajagopalan described an in-house framework called Hobie that packages reusable AI skills for regulated industries and complex enterprise projects, and stressed that the output is production software rather than proof-of-concept work.
That approach already puts Hang Ten against traditional systems integrators. Many engagements replace incumbent providers, though more than half of current opportunities are new projects companies had previously postponed. Rajagopalan said teams of two to four people can handle projects that once needed about 30, with customers or independent third parties still running final quality checks and certification. The company promises a tenfold improvement in cost, speed, or some mix of the two.
Even in four months, Hang Ten has fielded serious acquisition offers from what Sikka called very big companies, and turned them down to keep growing.
Before this, Sikka co-founded enterprise AI company VianAI in 2019 after leaving Infosys in 2017. That company raised $50 million in seed funding and later $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Sikka departed in April.
The name comes from the surfing maneuver where a rider puts all ten toes over the nose of the board.
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