Vishal Sikka had been at the helm of Infosys when it had given a grant to help OpenAI get off the ground, and he’s now come up with his own AI play a decade later.
Sikka has announced the launch of Hang Ten Systems, a new enterprise AI company aimed at helping large organizations make meaningful use of AI — not just in isolated pilots, but as a genuine force multiplier. The company already counts Fresenius and Siemens Energy among its clients, which signals that Sikka went to market quietly before going public with the announcement.
The name and the framing are deliberate. Sikka describes the current AI moment as a massive wave, and “hanging ten” — a surfing term for walking all the way to the front of the board with all ten toes over the nose — is his metaphor for mastering it rather than just surviving it. “Our dream is to help enterprises not just transform with AI, but use it as a force to do what no one could do before,” he wrote in his launch post.
What Sikka Has Been Up To
After stepping down from Infosys in August 2017 following a very public and acrimonious falling-out with co-founder Narayana Murthy, Sikka spent roughly two years building up to his next move. In 2019, he founded Vianai Systems, an enterprise AI company based in Palo Alto, seeded with $50 million in initial funding. Vianai’s thesis was human-centered AI for large enterprises — a platform that would let executives and developers actually use AI rather than just evaluate it. Over time, Vianai went deeper into the finance vertical, building out a product called hila, a conversational analytics tool aimed at CFOs and financial teams. The company went on to raise substantial follow-on capital, partnered with Google Cloud, Cognizant, and TCS, and had its hila product integrated into Gemini Enterprise.
Alongside Vianai, Sikka joined boards across industries — Oracle, BMW’s supervisory board, and GlaxoSmithKline — and remained an advisor to Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. He’s been vocal about AI’s risks and gaps, including the efficiency chasm between human cognition and current AI systems, and has consistently argued that India should build its own foundation models rather than conceding that space to the US and China.
Hang Ten appears to be a new venture distinct from Vianai, though both share the enterprise AI focus. The team Sikka has assembled for it includes people he has worked alongside for years — a core group he describes as “big wave surfers.”
The Backers
The funding round is led by Mayfield, with Navin Chaddha — a Stanford contemporary of Sikka’s — leading the investment. That long-standing relationship likely made the pitch short. Also in the round is Aramco Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Saudi Aramco, which gives Hang Ten an interesting angle into energy and industrial infrastructure — sectors where AI adoption is still relatively early but the scale of potential transformation is enormous. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo and another Stanford connection, joins the board.
The Silicon Valley angles here — Stanford network, Mayfield, a sprinkle of well-known angels — are familiar. But the Aramco involvement is the more strategically interesting element, particularly given that Siemens Energy is already a client. Energy and heavy industry are exactly the kinds of sectors where Sikka’s gap thesis holds: companies with enormous complexity, a lot of domain-specific expertise, and very uneven AI adoption.
The Gap He’s Betting On
Sikka’s post is candid about what he’s actually seen in the field. He describes watching people and teams who “just know what to do” with AI — reaching in minutes what could take years of toil — and then observing the far greater number who get nothing out of it, and sometimes cause harm trying. That gap, he argues, is the biggest opportunity of this moment.
It’s a thesis that sounds simple but is actually quite specific. Sikka isn’t building foundation models or a generic AI platform. He’s building for enterprises that are already trying to adopt AI and struggling to close the last mile — getting from the demo to real, organization-wide transformation. Given that Infosys itself had backed OpenAI when almost nobody else was paying attention, Sikka has as much context as anyone on how long the journey from promising AI research to enterprise-scale deployment actually takes.
Whether Hang Ten can deliver on that promise at the scale its early clients represent is the real test. But Sikka has spent the better part of a decade building toward exactly this moment, and the bet he’s making is a considered one.