Vishal Sikka is no stranger to shaking up the enterprise world. After leading Infosys—one of the globe’s largest IT services firms—and shaping SAP’s architecture as CTO, the Indian technologist returns with a venture still unnamed but with a stated ambition: to challenge the established order in IT services. The startup has already secured backing from Mayfield Fund and Aramco Ventures, and it brings together professionals with cross-cutting experience in three key domains: SAP, Infosys, and VianAI, Sikka’s previous bet on artificial intelligence.

The team and the Saudi axis

The roster includes veterans who know the inner workings of large-scale business platforms and global IT delivery. From SAP comes deep know-how in enterprise process automation, from Infosys the ability to orchestrate planet-scale implementations, and from VianAI expertise in AI models that Sikka had previously tried to place at the core of a service ecosystem. The involvement of Aramco Ventures, the venture arm of the Saudi oil giant, adds an unusual dimension: not only patient capital but also a strategic potential client with extreme requirements around security, data residency, and operational control. Mayfield, a longstanding Silicon Valley early-stage fund, brings the endorsement of the U.S. tech ecosystem and a network that can accelerate global market entry.

How IT services are changing

The IT services sector, dominated by the likes of Accenture, TCS, and Infosys itself, is undergoing a deep transformation. Automation driven by LLMs and the integration of AI into enterprise workflows are redrawing the boundary between consulting, implementation, and operations. Sikka, who during his Infosys tenure pushed hard for proprietary platforms and automation, likely intends to craft an offering where AI is not a peripheral add-on but the very engine of service delivery. From what can be inferred, the new company might propose a model in which IT service delivery is radically rethought: less body rental and more software-centric provision, with AI handling incidents, changes, and even part of application development.

The specter of digital sovereignty

The presence of Aramco Ventures is not just a matter of money. Saudi Arabia, through Vision 2030, is investing massively to build an autonomous digital infrastructure. Aramco handles data and industrial processes of national significance; for it, public cloud solutions are almost never an option. The choice to fund a startup aiming to reinvent IT services could signal a growing demand for managed services that reside entirely on-premise or in fully controlled hybrid environments. This trend, already observed in defense, finance, and energy, puts data sovereignty and the TCO of self-hosted architectures at center stage. For those evaluating on-premise deployments of LLMs and AI pipelines, the emergence of a well-backed operator like this could translate into more integrated “turnkey” services spanning hardware to orchestration, reducing the typical complexity of do-it-yourself projects.

What to watch now

Concrete details about the startup’s offering are still missing, but the profile of founders and backers suggests the project will be anything but marginal. If Sikka manages to combine deep AI automation with the control requirements that Aramco embodies, the impact could extend well beyond the kingdom, influencing decisions at large enterprises that are currently weighing whether to move AI workloads to local or hybrid infrastructure. As explored by AI-RADAR in the comparison between deployment models, on-premise architectures offer compliance guarantees and low latency but demand complex management skills; a player like Sikka’s could lower these barriers by offering managed services that do not sacrifice direct data control. The game has just begun.