We’re back to the nuts and bolts, baby.
Yesterday, Code Metal, a “code [translator] for mission critical industries” (we’ll explain, dw) announced that it’s raised a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Accel, B Capital, Smith Point Capital, J2 Ventures, Shield Capital, Overmatch, RTX, and others.
This latest round brings the company’s valuation to $1.25B, according to Code Metal EVP of Growth Laura Shen, and comes just a little over three months after the company raised a $36.5M Series A, led by Accel.
“I think we have shown some incredible product market fit very quickly, which has been very exciting,” she said. “We have proven ourselves to engineers, who are rightly AI skeptical, the technology’s ability to not just translate code from source to target, but more importantly, verify that code and optimize that code for the chips that they need.”
Sounds important and also complicated. But considering that’s kind of our thing, let’s dive in.
Lost in translation: Code Metal was founded in Boston in 2023 and, put simply, aims to automate, verify, and modernize software code for critical industries like automotive and defense.
- The company has an AI-powered platform that translates code from high-level languages (like Python and C++) to lower-level, hardware-specific languages (like Rust, VHDL, CUDA) that run efficiently on embedded systems and chips.
- They also provide code verification—important for industries like defense where, according to Shen, “every line of code counts.”
- They also help modernize code and accelerate code development in industries where, like, mistakes can result in injury, death, or national security risk.
“The defense industry, the automotive industry, the semiconductor industry— they all…have very elite engineers writing very math-oriented algorithms onto chips to make edge devices do really complex things,” Shen said.
“We target the friction points between writing the code in one language…and then all the steps that need to happen in order to make sure that code is verified and correct and safe enough to put onto a chip so that it can do what it needs to,” she added.
The company is also pretty helpful when you want to get advanced AI algorithms onto hardware or to the edge. “We’re speeding up the rate at which engineers writing exquisite algorithms that turn into features on automobiles or planes…get turned into code that gets put on chips,” Shen said.
And if the literal hundreds of millions of dollars from investors weren’t enough to convince you, the tech has been quite a hit with customers.
- Shen said they’re working with L3Harris, RTX (including Collins), Toshiba, and the US Air Force.
- The company has received $8.9M in public government contracts, according to Obviant data.
- Shen said the code modernization side of things has been particularly popular in the defense world. “There is a great deal of demand across the defense industry for movement into memory-safe languages like Rust,” Shen said.
Shen said that this new pile o’ cash will be used to scale up their engineering and go-to-market teams to “accelerate product development and expand the commercial government partnerships that we’ve already started.”
She expects the team to “double, if not triple” from about 75 before the end of the year.