Infosys Founder Bets $32M That AI Will Destroy His Old Company’s Business Model
What You Need to Know
- Vishal Sikka raised $32 million for Hang Ten Systems to replace traditional IT services with AI-generated code.
- Hang Ten uses agentic code generation and reusable skills library to undercut IT services firms’ headcount-based economics.
- Hang Ten launched one month ago and already has paying clients including Siemens Gamesa and Fresenius.
- Infosys shares fell 35% this year as analysts predict AI will disrupt the IT services sector.
Vishal Sikka, the former Infosys CEO who left that role in 2017, has raised $32 million in seed funding for a new startup called Hang Ten Systems that wants to replace traditional IT services firms with AI-generated code. Mayfield led the round, with Aramco Ventures participating as a strategic investor.
The thesis is direct: generative AI has collapsed the economics that made large IT services firms indispensable. For decades, enterprises paid firms like Infosys to customize and maintain software at a cost that scaled with headcount. Hang Ten’s model, built around agentic code generation and a reusable skills library, is a direct bet that this relationship no longer makes financial sense for clients. Sikka is not an outside observer here. He ran Infosys from 2014 to 2017 and spent 12 years before that at SAP overseeing products and technology. His previous AI venture, VianAI, raised $190 million across two rounds including a SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led raise in 2021, though Mayfield’s managing partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch the two companies serve meaningfully different markets.
Hang Ten went live roughly a month ago and already has paying clients, including Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and healthcare company Fresenius.
The timing is not incidental. Infosys shares have fallen more than 35% this year according to one report, and Jefferies analysts have argued the IT services sector faces early and meaningful AI disruption. Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani offered a more expansive read this week, suggesting AI could grow the industry’s addressable market to $300 billion to $400 billion by 2030, and the company partnered with Anthropic in February 2026 to integrate Claude into its Topaz platform. The incumbents, in other words, are not standing still, which makes Hang Ten’s early client traction the only metric that will matter in the near term.
The founding team is drawn almost entirely from Sikka’s prior ventures, with co-founders Navin Budhiraja, Sanjay Rajagopalan, and Tao Liu all having worked with him at SAP, Infosys, or VianAI. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang sits on the board. According to the company’s press release, the seed capital goes toward hiring and expanding work with large corporate clients, which suggests the immediate priority is proving the delivery model scales before the incumbents finish adapting their own.
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