Four months old, $85 million raised. Can Hang Ten Systems really build enterprise software with two engineers instead of thirty?

Key points

• Hang Ten Systems raised $53 million in a second seed round, bringing total funding to $85 million as of mid-2025.
• The round closed just five weeks after the startup's initial $32 million seed, itself raised only four months after the company was founded.
• Lead investor Xora, the early-stage arm of Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek, approached Hang Ten after seeing its early customer wins.
• Hang Ten is working with 21 major enterprises, including Fresenius Kabi and Siemens Energy, on deals spanning seven and eight figures.
• The startup claims it can complete some software projects with teams of two to four people that previously required around 30.

The surfing move called "hanging ten" means balancing with all ten toes curled over the nose of the board. Pure style, or a wipeout waiting to happen. Vishal Sikka, the former CEO of Indian IT giant Infosys, is betting his new startup can do the same on what he calls "probably the biggest wave of our lives."

Hang Ten Systems, founded in May 2025, just pulled in another $53 million in seed funding, a type of early investment given to startups before they have significant revenue, lifting its total raised to $85 million. That's a striking number for a company that didn't exist four months ago.

Who put in the money, and why?

Xora, the early-stage arm of Temasek, Singapore's state-owned investment fund, led the round. Rather than Hang Ten pitching Xora, Sikka told TechCrunch the investor came to them after seeing how quickly the startup was landing customers.

Mayfield, which led the first $32 million round, came back. Other backers include Aramco Ventures, Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who also sits on Hang Ten's board.

What does Hang Ten actually do?

Hang Ten advises large companies, those with over $10 billion a year in revenue, on AI strategy, then builds or modernises the software those companies need. Its target customer is not a startup. It's a Siemens or a Fresenius, organisations with huge, complicated IT systems that are expensive and slow to change.

The central claim is blunt. Chief technology officer Sanjay Rajagopalan says the startup uses a home-built tool called Hobie, a framework that packages reusable AI-powered building blocks tailored to regulated industries, to deliver finished production software, not prototypes, with far smaller teams. Two to four engineers on a project that once needed thirty. A ten-fold improvement in cost, speed, or both is the promise.

Sikka frames the shift this way: AI has moved the hard work upstream, to defining exactly what a system must do and checking whether it actually does it. Writing the code itself, he says, is "close to zero marginal cost, close to zero time."

One customer signed a multi-million-dollar contract within 25 days of a first meeting, Sikka told TechCrunch, adding he had never seen enterprise software deals move that fast. As we reported on 2 September, Wonderful took a different route to the same market: teams of engineers physically inside clients' offices, wiring up AI tools by hand. Hang Ten's bet is that the framework does what the on-site team used to.

Should ordinary workers be worried?

If two engineers can replace thirty, someone is losing work. Hang Ten's own data offers a partial answer: Rajagopalan says more than half of its current deals involve projects companies had previously shelved entirely, work that was never going to happen at traditional cost. New projects, not purely replacement jobs.

But the startup is also winning contracts that previously went to large IT services firms. Sikka knows that territory well. He ran Infosys, one of the giants this model threatens. His observation is pointed: "We are fortunate that we don't have the burden of legacy that we have to transform."

Hang Ten has already turned down acquisition offers from what Sikka described only as "very big companies." With fresh capital and plans to hire across Europe and India, the surfboard is in the water. The ten-fold efficiency claim is the number to watch: if customers start publishing their own results, that's when this story gets real.