Impulse Space, a startup founded by SpaceX engine guru Tom Mueller to build highly-maneuverable spacecraft, announced a $500 million Series D this week that it will use to hire as many as 200 new employees.
Sheryl Sandberg has led a $10 million investment into Self Inspection, a San Diego-based startup that is also backed by former Tesla president Jon McNeill’s DVx Ventures.
The startup, founded in 2021, has spent the last few years trying to disrupt the vehicle inspection process by making it possible to properly asses body damage on a car with as little tech as a smartphone camera. Self Inspection told TechCrunch that it has already completed more than 1 million vehicle inspections for rental fleets, automotive finance companies, auctions, and marketplaces, with Stellantis’ financial services arm using the platform for corporate-owned vehicles and lease-end inspections.
“The biggest technology companies are built by transforming industries that are massive, essential, and ready for change,” Sandberg said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Vehicle condition touches billions of dollars in automotive decisions every year, yet the data remains fragmented. That is changing. We believe Self Inspection will build the system of record that the automotive industry needs.”
The funding round was led by her family office, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, with strategic investment from tire distributor U.S. AutoForce and automotive lender Westlake Financial. Early stage funds Costanoa Ventures, Rebellion Ventures, and BrightCap Ventures also invested.
Self Inspection’s vehicle inspection softwareImage Credits:Self Inspection
Self Inspection is one of a number of startups trying to use AI to modernize the automotive industry. Toma and Flai are trying to improve dealership communication with voice agents. BidBus is making it possible for dealerships to competitively bid on privately-owned cars.
Other startups like UVeye have taken a bigger, infrastructure-level approach to modernizing vehicle inspections.
But a big part of Self Inspection’s pitch is simplicity. The company sells its software to customers like Stellantis, and that software allows the customer to send a link to anyone with a smartphone so they can upload photos of a car. Self Inspection’s software guides the user through the process, making sure the whole car is covered.
The company is basically leveraging the fact that “everyone has a good camera” and “knows how to capture photos,” CEO Constantine Yaremtso told TechCrunch last year.
From there, the photos get compared to what Self Inspection has described as “one of the largest datasets of damaged vehicles” to detect the presence and severity of any damage. After that, the startup’s software spits out a cost estimate and a detailed inspection report.
“What we deliver is actually a fully detailed PDF report that you would normally only get from a body shop, which will tell you what labor needs to be done on the damage, how much it costs to repair, how many parts do you need, and so on,” Yaremtso said. He added that Self Inspection can also pull data from an OBD2 computer for even more detailed information.
Self Inspection told TechCrunch that its platform has already helped its customers reduce their costs by over $80 million and save more than 300,000 operational hours. The startup plans to use the new funding to build more products, reach more enterprise customers, and expand to Europe.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@t
In Brief Posted:
12:46 PM PDT · July 15, 2026
Image Credits:Neko Health (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.
Neko Health, the body-scanning and health assessment startup founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek (pictured above, right) and his co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne (above, left), has raised a $700 million Series C.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners. This follows the company’s $260 million Series B raised in January 2025.
Neko Health has developed proprietary body-scanning technology, which it couples with bloodwork, to assess a person’s health. For gym lovers, the scan also now includes body composition information. It can couple the assessment with Apple Health data, which Nilsonne says gives its medical clinicians real-world data to use in its assessments.
Neko Health, which has locations in the UK and Sweden, is preparing for its first U.S. location in New York. The company says more than 100,000 people have already had scans and more than 350,000 people have either registered for the waitlist or set an appointment.
One of the people who had a Neko Health scan is Calm founder Alex Tew. He posted on X that it found a malignant mole on his back, which he promptly had removed. “I’m grateful to Neko for helping me discover this – I’m not sure how I would have otherwise.”
Neko Health isn’t the only health scanning company founded by tech folks. MidJourney, the AI Lab best known for its AI image and video creation model and website, is also creating a body scanner, which it plans to integrate into a spa experience with hot tubs and saunas, opening in San Francisco sometime in 2027.
Other investors in Neko Health’s latest round include Atomico, General Catalyst, Lakestar, Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD.
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China’s state-owned space company successfully launched a Long March orbital rocket and landed the booster on a seagoing recovery vessel, making it the second country to achieve the feat.
The demonstration on Friday shows that China’s Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) is poised to match the advance that catapulted SpaceX to the top of the heap: reusing the same booster again and again to drive down the cost of launching spacecraft. CASC said it would attempt to reuse the booster, which can carry about as much payload as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, by the end of the year.
Instead of unfolding landing legs to settle onto a floating platform, as the Falcon 9 does, China’s approach uses netting strung across a large frame onboard a recovery ship to capture the descending rocket. The ability to get the rocket back to the ship in a controlled flight, however, depends on sophisticated guidance software and sensors, along with engines that are reliable enough to restart and rugged enough to survive the descent back through the atmosphere.
SpaceX is currently breaking launch records on an annual basis with its fleet of reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters. The vehicle underpins the company’s Starlink satellite network, which depends on cheap, regular space access, as well as its work for NASA and the U.S. Space Force.
China wouldn’t compete directly with Musk’s company for launch customers due to national security rules that effectively split the global market for rockets between the U.S. and Europe on one hand, and Russia and China on the other. However, a reusable rocket would enable China’s satellite communications networks and hypothetical orbital data centers to compete with SpaceX’s offerings.
That would mean more competition for Starlink in global markets, particularly in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. For the U.S. military, it would mean a diminished advantage in space. The Long March booster recovery comes days after a consortium of investigative journalists reported new documents showing that China and Russia are cooperating on ways to damage Starlink because of its successes in Ukraine.
Unless, that is, SpaceX can get its much larger Starship rocket flying successfully. The last attempt to launch the rocket ended with mixed results at best, but Musk’s newly public conglomerate is expected to make another attempt this month. A static fire test of the huge booster appeared to go off without a hitch today.
The U.S. has other companies trying to develop reusable rockets, notably Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which recovered a booster in 2025 and reused it earlier this year. Blue Origin saw one of its rockets explode on the launch pad in May, delaying any further attempts for now. Rocket Lab has been working on Neutron, which is intended to fly with a reusable booster, while Stoke Space is developing a fully reusable rocket that it hopes to test this year. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of
Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.
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Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX.
“It’s real simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he cofounded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’s winter batch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin [an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth, through their fund Scribble Ventures] comes with all of that background and was able to help me think about fundraising and getting the company off the ground.
The two kept talking while Lapsa raised $1.34 billion — including a $510 million Series D funding round in 2025 — to build a rapidly reusable rocket that could fly this year. Now, the time is apparently right for Weil to join the board as a director to help continue scaling the company. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview, and he didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s outreach.
Weil’s past work has focused on digital products and platforms, which aren’t obviously on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently the head of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research, leaving the company after that program’s work was spread more widely across the frontier lab in April. He had previously served as OpenAI’s chief product officer from June 2024 until October 2025.
Weil’s last job raises one obvious question: OpenAI’s Sam Altman was reportedly kicking the tires on Stoke last year, contemplating an investment in his own SpaceX competitor. Could Weil be the link between the frontier AI lab and a possible partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumors” about OpenAI, saying Weil’s role was to focus on Stoke itself.
Stoke is building a rocket, Nova, that is intended to be completely reusable and can be flown again and again. No one has ever done that before, with the SpaceX coming the closest with its enormous Starship rocket. The technological challenges of reusing a rocket—particularly its ability to survive the extreme heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from space—deterred even space investors with the deepest pockets. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, has flirted with the approach, but hasn’t prioritized it.
Now, though, SpaceX’s blockbuster stock market debut—with much of its value resting on Elon Musk’s promises that Starship will be flying operational missions this year—has proven Lapsa’s foresight. Despite many billions of dollars invested in new launch vehicles, there aren’t enough rockets to go around, and the next company to get a reasonably-priced rocket flying regularly promises to make a killing.
“The world is realizing that launch is still not solved,” Lapsa said. “The idea of full, rapid reuse was a little bit out there at that time…that’s now been rather normalized, and people see the inevitable now.”
Notably, the idea of building distributed data centers in space to leverage solar power and escape political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some venture capitalists. The key obstacle there is the cost of getting all those computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “really only make sense with full rapid reuse,” Lapsa said, which could be a key differentiator for Stoke as its rocket starts flying.
Military contracts will also be key to the company’s success, and Weil has experience bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense; he was one of four tech movers and shakers who joined the US Army Reserve in a bid to improve recruitment and cooperation between the Army and industry. And this isn’t his first time in the space business. Weil served as the president of Planet Labs, a satellite earth observation company, for three years as it went public 2021.
Whatever Weil can add to the company’s s
The days of Nvidia’s unparalleled market dominance aren’t over, but challengers and choices are arising from all directions.
ZML, a hot French AI startup endorsed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has released inference-performance software that allows a variety of open-source large language models to run on a variety of chips — including Nvidia’s, AMD’s, Google’s TPU, Apple Metal and Intel Arc.
With ZML/LLMD, the newly launched LLM inference server, the company’s ambition is to break existing silos and make different chips available for AI use cases at their maximum available speed, and sometimes faster, ZML founder Steeve Morin told TechCrunch.
As AI becomes integrated into our work and everyday lives, optimizing inference — aka, the processing of prompts — has been outpacing model raining in importance, but often feels patchy behind the scenes, with software and architecture barriers that lead to vendor lock-in, Morin said.
The promise of achieving peak performance across a variety of chips is a technological feat, but it could also be a market disruptor, amid mounting fears over AI-related costs.
ZML hopes to provide enterprises and clouds with the option to use a mix of chips, some of which might be less costly or consume less energy. “The idea is to give people back the power to create their own system and achieve real efficiency gains that allow [AI] to be disseminated,” Morin said.
Such a software assist may help novel AI chipmakers, many of which happen to be from Europe, Morin observed, citing Axelera, Fractile, Kalray, OLIX, Q.ANT, SiPearl, SpiNNcloud, and VSORA. But more than their region of origin, what matters to him is that ZML can work with them on “things that haven’t been done before anywhere in the world.”
That doesn’t mean Morin is bearish on Nvidia. He’s not, in part because of its existing supply. He told TechCrunch that ZML has a good relationship with the AI chip giant, which has been gearing up for the rise of inference.
Inference has been an area of such intense investment, that the trend has been hailed the “inference gold rush.” So ZML has competition such as Baseten, recently valued at $13 billion; Inferact, from the creators of open source project vLLM; as well as RadixArk, the commercial company behind SGLang.
Both vLLM and SGLang partially compete with LLMD, but Morin’s ambitions for ZML cover a broader spectrum. “We have reached the point where we are co-designing silicon,” he said. He further credited ZML’s lean team of 20 people as the reason why the Paris-based startup has been able to move fast, with more releases in the plans.
It also helped that this small team is well funded for its size. Thanks to his track record as VP of engineering of Zenly, which Snapchat acquired for nine figures in 2017, Morin raised $20 million from venture firms including Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, >commit, AALVC, Drysdale Ventures, Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures, Kindred Capital, LocalGlobe, and Puzzle Ventures.
Unlike ZML’s first public project, the inference-focused ML framework released in 2024 and updated in March, ZML/LLMD is not open source. But it is launching as a free product with the goal of learning about usage. “I’d rather measure and [then generate revenue] where it is most effective without hindering my growth stupidly because I have been too greedy from the get-go,” Morin said.
It is too early to tell when ZML/LLMD might become a paid product, and what its adoption will look like. But the startup’s cap table confirms that other founders are paying attention, including Dagger and Docker founder Solomon Hykes, Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face, as well LeCun, now with AMI Labs. This also builds the case that Europe’s AI startups can now build from home. “I couldn’t do ZML anywhere but in Paris,” Morin said. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Anna Heim is a writer and editorial c
One last chance to apply
Due to overwhelming interest, we’ve extended applications for Startup Battlefield Australia to July 20.
If you’ve been thinking about applying, do it now. There won’t be another extension.
One application could change everything
Since the first Startup Battlefield Australia in 2017, there have been 26 alumni companies that have collectively raised over $147 million, with three successful acquisitions. They’ve been backed by some of the world’s most respected investors — including Y Combinator, Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Khosla Ventures, Microsoft, AirTree Ventures, Startmate, Techstars, and SOSV.
It all started with one decision: They applied.
Why apply now?
If you’re building something ambitious, this is a fast track to the people who can move your startup forward.
Selected founders will pitch live to:
Top-tier investors.
Global media.
Australia’s leading founders and operators.
Potential partners, customers, and hires.
This is more than a pitch competition. It’s a chance to earn visibility, credibility, and connections that can take years to build.
What’s at stake?
On August 19, 2026, eight startups will pitch live at Stripe Tour Sydney.
The top three will receive up to $15,000 in Stripe fee credits.
The grand prize is even bigger:
Automatic entry into Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this October.
No second application. No extra round. Just a direct path to one of the world’s biggest startup stages.
Who should apply?
We’re looking for early-stage startups across Australia and New Zealand that are:
Pre-seed to Series B.
Building a real product or showing strong traction.
Ready to scale.
Ready to tell their story.
You don’t need to be a household name.
We’re looking for the next one.
The deadline has moved — the opportunity hasn’t
This extension gives you more time, but not much.
Applications now close July 20.
If you’ve been waiting, this is the moment.
Submit your application before July 20.
Free to apply. No equity taken. One opportunity that could change everything.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Isabelle leads Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s iconic launchpad and competition for the world’s most promising early-stage startups.
You can contact or verify outreach from Isabelle by emailing isabelle.johannessen@techcrunch.com.
She scouts top founders across 99+ countries and prepares them to pitch on the Disrupt stage in front of tier-one investors and global media. Before TechCrunch, she designed and led international startup acceleration programs across Japan, Korea, Italy, and Spain—connecting global founders with VCs and helping them successfully enter the U.S. market. With a Master’s in Entrepreneurship & Disruptive Innovation—and a past life as a professional singer—she brings a blend of strategic rigor and stage presence to help founders craft compelling stories and stand out in crowded markets.
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Selling a car is a pain. You can take the easy route and use services like Carvana, but you may wind up with thousands of dollars less than your car is worth. Or, you could hope for more by going to a dealership, but the dealer’s offer can vary wildly depending on what they’re looking for, never mind the extra time and effort on your part.
A Los Angeles-based startup called Bidbus has spent the last few years trying to combine the best of those options, making it so sellers don’t need to leave their couch to get dealership-level offers. The company has created a digital marketplace where multiple dealers can bid on a car, a process that results in an average offer that’s about $2,000 to $3,000 higher than what Carvana offers, according to Bidbus’ founders.
Now, looking to scale beyond its initial markets of California and Texas, the startup has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by early-stage mobility fund Ibex Investors. The round also saw participation from Mucker Capital, FJ Labs, Motley Fool Ventures, DataPoint Capital, Walter Ventures, and the Car Dealership Guy’s Yossi Levi.
Bidbus’ co-founder and CEO Duke Yan told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview that he came up with the idea after years spent buying and selling cars on his own. When he tried to help his mom get rid of her car, the offers from dealers were insultingly low, so he put them in a group chat. To his surprise, buyers started bidding up the price.
“Used-car affordability is not a financing problem. It’s a market efficiency problem. Consumers lack real price discovery for trade-ins, dealers struggle to source quality inventory, and much of the best supply is still trapped in people’s driveways,” Yan told TechCrunch.
It’s a clever combination. Dealerships already buy cars at auctions to fill inventory, so the startup is not pitching a foreign idea. Yan said Bidbus helps dealers by bringing them the most highly-valued used cars, which tend to come from private sellers. The startup takes advantage of the spread between what online sellers are willing to pay and the typically-higher dealer payout: a difference that can stretch to thousands of dollars.
But netting sellers more money, even after Bidbus takes a cut, wasn’t enough for Yan. He also wants to make the experience fun, and has taken inspiration from stock trading apps like Robinhood and social media apps like TikTok.
Once a car is accepted on the platform, dealers only have a few hours to bid. Bidbus shows live bids with the corresponding offers displayed in big font. The expectation, Yan said, is for Bidbus users to share screenshots or videos of this activity to raise awareness of the app and draw in new potential sellers.
“Our vision is to make selling a car as transparent and competitive as trading a stock, where price is determined by market competition rather than a single buyer,” Yan said.
Growing Bidbus hasn’t been easy, Yan said. The company was bootstrapped in the beginning, and while it got some early traction, he admitted he had to ban one of the platform’s largest dealers.
“At that time, he was the only one that bought so many cars, and so he felt like he could get away with haggling or low-balling,” Yan said. “It hurt at first, but now our platform is better than ever. We have five to eight more dealers like him, buying a lot, upholding the standard [experience] that we want our customers to go through.”
Jeff Peters, the partner at Ibex who led the funding round, said he held back on investing in Bidbus’ seed round mostly because the company was only operating in Los Angeles at the time. But once Bidbus started spreading to new markets, bringing on new customers, and signing dealership groups like Lithia Motors and Penske Automotive, Peters wanted in.
“It seems like this is scalable, and that it’s a universal problem and a universal opportunity, at least across the United States. I think it’s gonna be durable, too, because some of the most durable business models
Every startup has a moment that changes everything.
For some, it’s landing their first customer. For others, it’s closing their first funding round.
For a select few, it starts with one pitch.
If you’re going to apply for Startup Battlefield Australia, now is the time. Applications close July 6, and once the deadline passes, the opportunity is gone.
Who should apply?
If you’re an early-stage startup in Australia or New Zealand, this opportunity was built for you.
We’re looking for founders who are:
Pre-seed to Series A.
Building a real product with early traction.
Solving meaningful problems with innovative technology.
Ready to introduce their company to investors, media, and the broader startup ecosystem.
You don’t need to be famous.
In fact, that’s the point.
Startup Battlefield exists to discover the next breakout company before everyone else does.
What’s at stake?
On August 19, 2026, eight selected startups will take the stage live at Stripe Tour Sydney in front of leading investors, global media, and Australia’s technology community.
The top three startups will receive up to $15,000 in Stripe fee credits.
The grand prize goes even further.
The winner receives automatic entry into Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 — one of the world’s most prestigious startup competitions — in San Francisco this October.
The countdown is on
The application window is almost closed.
When the deadline passes, there are no extensions, no second chances, and no late submissions.
If you’ve been thinking about applying, don’t spend another day wondering, “What if?”
Submit your application now and give your startup the opportunity to become the next company everyone is talking about.
Applications close July 6
Don’t let this opportunity become the one that got away.
Apply now
Free to apply • No equity taken • Live in Sydney on August 19, 2026. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Isabelle leads Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s iconic launchpad and competition for the world’s most promising early-stage startups.
You can contact or verify outreach from Isabelle by emailing isabelle.johannessen@techcrunch.com.
She scouts top founders across 99+ countries and prepares them to pitch on the Disrupt stage in front of tier-one investors and global media. Before TechCrunch, she designed and led international startup acceleration programs across Japan, Korea, Italy, and Spain—connecting global founders with VCs and helping them successfully enter the U.S. market. With a Master’s in Entrepreneurship & Disruptive Innovation—and a past life as a professional singer—she brings a blend of strategic rigor and stage presence to help founders craft compelling stories and stand out in crowded markets.
View Bio
Militaries routinely send satellites to fly by rival vehicles and suss out their capabilities, but scaling up this kind of reconnaissance is increasingly seen by the U.S. military as a challenge best handled by the private sector.
That’s why two space startups, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab, completed a rendezvous mission for the U.S. Space Force last week so complex, it was like something out of “Top Gun.” Their two rival satellites met up in orbit, close enough for one to capture imagery of the other.
The exercise, dubbed Victus Haze, demonstrated the close inspection of a space vehicle soon after it arrived in orbit, a necessity in a world where the U.S., Russia, and China are deploying novel space weapons.
“China and Russia launch capabilities to space on a regular basis, and part of the Space Force’s job is to understand what those capabilities are,” True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, a veteran of the U.S. military’s space efforts, told TechCrunch. “Right now we have gaps in our collection capability.”
The June mission saw Rocket Lab, a rocket-building rival to SpaceX that recently announced its acquisition of Iridium, launch a spacecraft called Puma just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving notice, which is notable because most rocket launches are buttoned up months in advance.
A Jackal spacecraft built by True Anomaly was waiting in orbit to intercept it. As part of the exercise, the company didn’t know where Puma would arrive in space but used onboard sensors to find and identify its target from 2,000 kilometers away. The Jackal then flew close to the target — exactly how close is classified — and orbited it, capturing imagery of different parts of the vehicle, before returning to its starting point in orbit.
True Anomaly’s CEO said that, outside of NASA and Space Force space flight missions with humans, “this is probably the most complex rendezvous and proximity operation between two spacecraft in modern history.”
Bringing together two spacecraft in orbit, where they’re both moving at speeds approaching 17,500 mph, is no easy feat. Previous private demonstrations, like those performed by Northrop Grumman’s maintenance satellites or Astroscale’s orbital garbage hunting missions, operate on slower time frames.
And now things get interesting: The two companies are prepared to perform new exercises in the weeks ahead with increasing difficulty, which could include Rocket Lab’s Puma trying to evade True Anomaly’s Jackal and performing its own inspection maneuvers.
Founded in 2022 by Rogers and a cadre of former military space experts, True Anomaly planned to build both the hardware and software to enable the new tasks assigned to the U.S. Space Force when it was created in 2019. After several years of development missions, last month’s demonstration has begun to realize that vision.
“That’s the secret sauce of this company,” said Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse Ventures who sits on True Anomaly’s board. “It’s not one spacecraft architecture or one piece of software or a certain set of payloads — it’s a deep, deep understanding of what tactics and doctrine look like in this domain.”
True Anomaly has raised just over $1 billion, including a $650 million round in March. Now the company will look to compete for a number of task orders, particularly in the Space Force’s $6.2 billion Andromeda program, which looks to the private sector for exactly this kind of maneuverable reconnaissance.
“Flight heritage is everything, and demonstrated capability is what speaks the loudest with these opportunities,” Rogers said.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of
Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quar
For decades, IT services firms made billions of dollars by allowing companies to outsource tech tasks like
customizing, integrating, and maintaining enterprise software. Vishal Sikka, former CEO of Infosys, one of the largest such firms in India, is now betting that AI can do much of that work instead.
His new startup, Hang Ten Systems, has raised a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield, it said Wednesday, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and participation from angel investors. The startup, whose board includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, said it helps enterprises continuously build, modify, and operate software using AI-driven development and automation.
Hang Ten enters a market where IT services firms, including Infosys, are racing to adapt to AI through partnerships with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
The startup’s launch comes amid a growing debate over whether AI will expand the industry’s addressable market or fundamentally alter how enterprise software is built, maintained, and delivered.
Clearly, some enterprises are eager to try the AI-services idea, especially from someone as experienced as Sikka, who spent 12 years building enterprise software at SAP, and later as a board member for Oracle. Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch that the company “just got started a month back” and already has customers.
The startup said it is working with customers including Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius on AI-native project delivery. In a separate blog post announcing the venture, Sikka, 59, said Hang Ten was already helping large enterprises “hang ten on the biggest wave of our lifetimes.”
Headquartered in the Bay Area, Hang Ten told TechCrunch that it is hiring across delivery, engineering, sales, and leadership and plans to expand across multiple locations globally to meet enterprise demand.
The early crew at the startup includes executives who have worked with Sikka for years across SAP, Infosys and his previous enterprise AI startup, VianAI, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Among them are co-founders Navin Budhiraja, the startup’s CTO, Sanjay Rajagopalan, its chief design officer, and Tao Liu, its senior vice president of forward deployed engineering.
After stepping down as Infosys’ chief executive in 2017, Sikka founded VianAI, which emerged from stealth in 2019 with $50 million in seed funding and later raised $140 million in a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Chaddha told TechCrunch Hang Ten is distinct from VianAI, describing Sikka’s earlier venture as focused on a different market. VianAI focused on enterprise AI applications and analytics tools designed to help businesses use artificial intelligence in decision-making. Hang Ten, by contrast, describes itself as an enterprise AI services company built around agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and domain expertise.
Mayfield backed Hang Ten because of Sikka’s career experience, as well as its belief that the startup’s AI-native model can scale differently from traditional services firms.
“Traditional services scale linearly with headcount,” Mayfield said. “Hang Ten is built so its leverage grows with every project.”
Hang Ten emerges as investors debate how AI will affect the economics of the IT services industry. Analysts at Jefferies argued earlier this year that IT services may be among the first sectors to face meaningful AI disruption. Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani, however, this week said AI could expand the industry’s addressable market.
Infosys itself has sought to position AI as an opportunity rather than a threat, telling investors this month that “AI-first services” could represent a $300 billion-$400 billion market by 2030. The debate comes as investors reassess the outlook for traditional IT services firms, with Infosys shares down over 35% this year. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial i
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