Aramco Ventures backs Hang Ten's challenge to IT services

Published: 2026-06-26T10:16:00.000Z

The IT services industry has spent decades selling enterprises armies of engineers who maintain software by hand. Hang Ten Systems is betting AI has broken that model, and Aramco Ventures is backing the bet. The startup, founded by former Infosys chief Vishal Sikka, raised a $32 million seed round.

The IT services industry has spent decades selling enterprises the same basic product, namely armies of engineers who customize and maintain software by hand. Hang Ten Systems is betting that AI has just broken the economics of that model, and a notable name from the Gulf is backing the bet. The Palo Alto startup, founded by former Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka, has raised a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures, the venture arm of the Saudi oil giant, alongside a group of angel investors. The company's board includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, which adds further weight to an already pedigreed launch. The pitch turns on a structural flaw in how traditional IT services work. Firms like Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro scale almost linearly with headcount, since more projects mean more engineers, which keeps margins capped and delivery slow. Hang Ten argues that generative AI changes that math entirely, using agentic code generation, a reusable library of AI skills and a smaller core of experienced engineers to build, modify and operate enterprise software far faster and more cheaply. Sikka framed the stakes bluntly, saying that every enterprise will be transformed by AI, that a few are already building in days what used to take years, and that most are stuck at the starting line while the gap widens. Hang Ten is positioning itself to close that gap. The founder's credibility is central to why investors moved so quickly. Sikka spent 12 years at SAP overseeing products and technology, ran Infosys as chief executive from 2014 to 2017, sat on Oracle's board, and later founded the enterprise AI startup VianAI. He has pulled much of his old team with him, including a chief technology officer, chief design officer and engineering leaders who worked alongside him at those companies. Despite only going live about a month ago, Hang Ten already has paying customers, including Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and the healthcare provider Fresenius, working on what it calls AI-native project delivery. Aramco Ventures' involvement is the strategically interesting thread for the region. The firm manages $7.5 billion in committed capital across strategic, diversified, domestic and late stage venturing programs, and crucially it offers more than money, since it can connect portfolio companies to deployment opportunities inside Aramco and across global markets. For a startup trying to prove that AI-native services work at enterprise scale, access to a company as vast and operationally complex as Aramco is a powerful testing ground. Aramco Ventures chief executive Mahdi Aladel called enterprise scale AI deployment the biggest challenge and opportunity of the moment. The regional read connects to a familiar Saudi ambition. The kingdom has been pushing hard to move its own enterprises from AI experimentation to measurable execution, and backing a company built specifically to deliver that transformation gives Aramco both a strategic tool and a window into frontier AI services. As Gulf enterprises chase real returns on heavy AI spending, an investment like this positions Saudi capital right at the center of the fight to reinvent how the world's largest companies build and run their software.