Code Metal Secures $125M to Modernize Defense Software With AI Without Introducing New Vulnerabilities

Code Metal Secures $125M to Modernize Defense Software With AI Without Introducing New Vulnerabilities

Boston-based startup Code Metal has announced a $125 million Series B funding round led by strategic investors from the defense and aerospace sectors, including a major U.S. defense contractor and a sovereign wealth fund with national security interests. The capital will accelerate the development of its proprietary AI platform designed to automatically translate, refactor, and validate legacy code used in critical defense systems — from nuclear command-and-control interfaces to encrypted battlefield communications.

Unlike traditional modernization efforts that often introduce new bugs, security flaws, or system failures during migration, Code Metal’s technology focuses on preserving functional equivalence while upgrading architecture. The company claims its algorithms can analyze millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN, and assembly code — common in systems built during the Cold War — and convert them into secure, maintainable modern languages like Rust and Python, all while maintaining verifiable behavioral consistency.

"The defense industry has been stuck between a rock and a hard place: keep aging systems running at great risk, or replace them and risk catastrophic failure during transition," said CEO Elena Vasquez in an exclusive interview. "Our mission is to eliminate that false choice. We don’t just rewrite code — we prove it still does exactly what it was meant to do, down to the last register state."

According to internal Pentagon assessments obtained by this outlet, over 60% of mission-critical defense software systems still rely on code written before 1990. Many of these systems lack proper documentation, original developers are retired or deceased, and patching them manually is both slow and error-prone. In 2022, a software glitch in a legacy radar system led to a false missile alert in the Pacific — an incident later traced to a memory overflow in 1980s-era Fortran code.

Code Metal’s platform uses a combination of symbolic execution, differential testing, and neural network-based pattern recognition to compare pre- and post-refactored code behavior across thousands of test scenarios. The system flags even minor deviations — such as altered timing sequences or floating-point rounding errors — that could compromise safety-critical operations.

While the company’s technology is proprietary, its methodology echoes academic research in formal verification and program synthesis. Independent audits by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have validated Code Metal’s ability to achieve 99.8% behavioral fidelity in pilot programs with the U.S. Air Force and Navy.

Notably, the company has declined to disclose whether its AI tools are trained on open-source repositories like GitHub or Stack Overflow — a point of concern for some cybersecurity experts. However, Code Metal insists its training data consists exclusively of anonymized, de-identified legacy code provided under strict non-disclosure agreements by defense contractors.

"We’re not scraping public forums," Vasquez emphasized. "We’re working with classified, government-owned systems. Our AI learns from the actual artifacts of national security infrastructure — not from hobbyist code snippets or forum troubleshooting threads."

The funding round also includes a $20 million commitment from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Innovation Unit to integrate Code Metal’s tools into the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative, a multi-year effort to unify disparate military systems into a single networked architecture.

Industry analysts see this as a watershed moment. "This isn’t just about software modernization — it’s about preserving the integrity of America’s defense ecosystem," said Dr. Rajiv Mehta, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Code Metal is building the first scalable, auditable bridge between the analog-age military and the digital future."

As global competitors like China and Russia accelerate their own AI-driven code modernization programs, Code Metal’s success could determine whether the U.S. maintains its technological edge in warfare — not by building faster weapons, but by ensuring the software that controls them remains reliable, secure, and trustworthy.