Big day for the backend side of defense.
This morning, software-for-defense hotshot Code Metal announced that it’s won a $80M OTA to “advance WarMatrix, the AI-enabled modeling and simulation platform Code Metal built in partnership with the U.S. Air Force.”
- Per the company, the money will “fund Code Metal’s work in applying its provable AI technology to orchestrate long-trusted systems, such as AFSIM (the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling), across the Department’s wargaming and operational analysis efforts.
- Basically, they’ll take the Pentagon’s old-school—but extensively tested—simulation tech and make it play nicely with all the fun, new-fangled AI we have these days. Crucially, Code Metal says it can mathematically verify that those models still behave the same way after they’ve been transformed, so the Pentagon doesn’t have to toss out decades of testing and start from scratch.
“We’re really excited,” Code Metal CEO and co-founder Peter Morales told Tectonic. “The work that we’re focusing on [with WarMatrix] is really leveraging the core technology behind Code Metal, which is the ability to rewrite code, but generate proof that when you’ve rewritten that code, it actually maintained its intent, its behavior, and has any sort of new spec requirements that you need the code to have in its target environment.”
Metalheads: We’ve covered Code Metal before—the company (founded back in 2023) has built a software stack that translates, automates, verifies, and modernizes software code for “mission-critical industries,” especially defense. Here’s what that looks like:
- Translating algorithms written in high-level, legacy programming languages (like Python, C++, or MATLAB) into lower-level, hardware-specific languages and production code (Rust, VHDL, CUDA) for stuff like chips, embedded systems, and edge devices.
- Verifying that the translated code is correct, runs smoothly, and is safe enough for regulated and high-consequence environments and systems, whether that’s an aircraft subsystem, sensor, or radio.
- Ultimately, they’re filling the gap “between an algorithm that works in a model and a capability that works in the field,” according to Morales. Seems useful.
And in the past few years, they’ve built up a pretty impressive roster of customers, including L3Harris, RTX, Toshiba, and the US Air Force.
- They also raised a sweet, sweet $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.25B valuation back in February.
Lost in translation: WarMatrix is an interesting use of Code Metal’s code translation capabilities.
- The platform is the Air Force’s push to take wargaming from a slow, largely manual exercise into a fast, software-driven simulation environment.
- Code Metal’s work on the tech that would feed into WarMatrix started in 2024 with a $145K SBIR Phase I for its STRATEGIC Engine wargaming platform. That grew into a $1.8M Phase II in May 2025, before the Air Force awarded the company a WarMatrix-specific SBIR Phase III with a $17.4M ceiling that September.
- Code Metal’s job is to make sure that AI models can run “on top of the DoW’s existing modeling and simulation ecosystem without invalidating the decades of testing behind it,” per the company.
Branching out: The idea behind WarMatrix is that rather than using pen, paper, whiteboards, and tables, the program can model a campaign when you ask it something like, “What happens in a Taiwan scenario if we buy 200 more CCAs instead of 20 more fighters?”
- The platform orchestrates all of the different models and data the military has to simulate the campaign—aircraft ranges, weapons, sensors, losses, logistics, basing, etc.—and then lets planners change variables.
- For example, it can update the outcome based on whether, say, we ran out of precision munitions, or we lost an aircraft carrier, or Andersen AFB gets knocked out.
- Users can run lots of these different “What if?” scenarios, then compare the outcomes. Not only does it make planning easier, but it can help inform what the service should invest in.
- And WarMatrix is, like, actually being used—the Air Force publicly used the platform operationally for the first time during its GE 26 Benchmark Wargame in March 2026 with over 150 participants.
And now, with Code Metal’s help, they’ll be able to integrate even more of the fancy AI tools and expensive modeling and simulation capabilities into the platform. Good to actually be able to use the stuff you’ve paid for, after all.
Big ups: Morales told Tectonic that he doesn’t expect the work to stop here. He said they’re already working with the Marines, and “[they’re] moving [their] way along the line.”
“I believe we’ll move quickly into more services,” he said. “There’s just an unfathomable amount of government code that could provide value…if you could integrate and automate the analyses that you would run anyway [as part of wargaming]…that’s a huge amount of unlocked power to the warfighters.”
“Being able to push the future forward faster is exciting,” Morales added. “And that’s exactly what Code Metal’s built to do. The fact that the warfighter was spending years and years on [WarMatrix] and we were like, no, we can do it in six months. Having them trust us and be able to make these crazy pushes has been really exciting to me.”
