Code Metal Raises $125 Million to Rewrite the Defense Industry’s Code With AI

Metal Code, one A Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages ​​just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just months after the startup raised $36 million in Series A funding led by Accel.

Code Metal is part of a new wave of startups aiming to modernize the tech industry by using AI to generate code and translate it into programming languages. One of the lingering questions about AI-assisted coding is whether the result is good – and what the consequences might be if it isn’t.

Over the past two years, companies like Antithesis, Code Rabbit, Synthesized, Theorem, and Harness have all secured millions of dollars in venture capital funding for their approaches to automating, validating, testing, and securing AI-generated code. These startups are selling the “picks and shovels” of the AI ​​gold rush: technological tools serving a broader industry. Even though some of the methodologies behind their technology are unproven, investors are willing to bet that at least a few of them will succeed.

Code Metal, founded in 2023, has focused its efforts on code translation and verification for the defense industry. L3Harris, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and the US Air Force are among its first customers. The startup also works with Japanese electronics company Toshiba and says it is in talks with a major chip company to work on code portability between chip platforms, although the company declined to say which one.

The startup’s software platform translates code from high-level programming languages ​​like Python, Julia, Matlab, and C++ to lower-level languages ​​or code that runs on specific hardware, like Rust, VHDL, and chip-specific languages ​​like Nvidia’s CUDA.

Code Metal CEO Peter Morales, who previously worked at Microsoft and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, says the market is starting to recognize “big problems” in an industry that could, in the not-so-distant future, be underpinned by AI-generated code. One of these problems is porting old code to new applications. If a government agency or defense contractor needs to get coding work done quickly, Morales says, but only has access to engineers who specialize in an existing programming language, that slows everyone down.

Morales cites a recent paper on Karpathy concluded: “It seems likely that we will end up rewriting large fractions of all software ever written multiple times. »

“That’s all we do in one tweet,” Morales says.

One of Code Metal’s investors, Yan-David Erlich, general partner at B Capital, says the reality is that some of the code that controls critical communications infrastructure, and even satellites, “is old, it’s crude, it’s written in programming languages ​​that people maybe don’t use anymore. It needs to be modernized.”

“But during the translation,” Erlich added, “you might insert bugs, which is catastrophically problematic.”

That’s where Code Metal says its proprietary technology comes in. Morales explains that at each stage of translation, Code Metal’s software generates a series of tests (a virtual container of data and tools) that evaluate the code and show customers how it works. Asked about Code Metal’s translation error rate, Morales says it largely depends on how difficult the code conversion is, but that for the pipelines Code Metal is currently running, “there’s no way to throw an error. The software will just say, ‘There’s no solution to this’ if we can’t complete the translation.”

The startup is reluctant to share too many details about its methodology. One element of the business he isn’t shy about talking about, however, is its approach to pricing.