By: Ida Girma and Yan-David (Yanda) Erlich

 

B Capital is thrilled to partner with Code Metal as the company scales verifiable code translation for mission-critical systems.

 

Automated AI at a Higher Standard

AI has transformed how we write software. Coding copilots and platforms now produce capable code and meaningfully accelerate developer workflows. Much of the recent discourse across our industry and society centers on the massive productivity unlock, and manifold downstream effects, of advanced AI in coding. It is good and fast. For many traditional applications, this is enough.

But in domains like defense and aerospace, “good enough” is not good enough. In these environments, code runs satellites, jets, and edge devices deployed in contested or safety-critical settings. Regulation and compliance standards are high and uncompromising. A hallucinated function, unchecked edge case, or subtle memory bug can threaten national security, infrastructure, and, most gravely, human life.

 

The Defense Imperative

The Pentagon recently asserted that “AI-enabled capability development will re-define the character of military affairs over the next decade,” with defense budgets designed accordingly. Other governments similarly prioritize AI. The leading international summit on AI in the military domain acknowledges that AI “can and should contribute to international peace and security… help reduce the exposure of personnel to danger, improve the protection of civilians, and support more timely and better-informed decision-making.” As states intensify focus on AI, the need for verified, trustworthy code translation and edge computing has never been more urgent.

Yet policy ambition outpaces tooling. Code Metal has emerged as one of the fastest-growing defense technology companies precisely because it solves a severe and underappreciated problem: translating and optimizing massive codebases across hardware architectures and programming paradigms, with near-zero tolerance for error.

 

Code Metal’s Solution

Code Metal unites high-level reasoning with low-level verification to produce tested, optimized, and compliant code ready to deploy. This hybrid approach creates a translation and optimization engine reliable enough for defense and industrial customers, and engineers trust it in production.

Consider the challenge facing defense systems engineers today. When satellite communications protocols must be updated or ported to new hardware, or when legacy C++ defense systems must be modernized into memory-safe Rust to prevent cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the work is painstaking, manual, and slow. Existing AI coding tools offer speed, but they are not built for deployment in mission-critical environments.

Code Metal automates this translation with verification guarantees these systems demand—accelerating time-to-market, enabling portability across chips and devices, and powering rapid codebase modernization.

 

Growth at an Inflection Point

Code Metal has built remarkable commercial momentum in just two-and-a-half years since founding, winning customers including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, Toshiba, and RTX. The company is hitting hypergrowth, validating both the severity of the problem and the elegance of its solution.

While Code Metal’s initial work centered on defense applications, the platform also serves many enterprise domains. In telecommunications, companies are eager to translate high-level MATLAB prototypes into production-ready, edge-deployable code in days instead of months. Semiconductor manufacturers must rapidly translate open-source CUDA implementations into frameworks compatible with their chips. In automotive, industrial equipment, and other regulated spaces, the need recurs: moving prototypes to production, porting code between devices, and modernizing legacy systems into memory-safe languages—quickly, securely, and reliably. Code Metal enables all of this.

 

B Capital’s Verified Intelligence Thesis

Code Metal is B Capital’s latest investment in an AI thesis we’ve developed: as AI systems embed more deeply into critical infrastructure and decision-making, the standard must rise from plausible outputs to provable correctness. We need verified intelligence.

With our investments in Axiom (frontier mathematical reasoning, theorem proving, and discovery), Goodfire (interpretability research and systems design), and now Code Metal, we’ve put this conviction to work. Each portfolio company attacks a different surface of the problem. Together, they reflect our belief that trust in AI behaviors and outputs is essential in high-stakes domains.

Our verified intelligence thesis is deliberate and high conviction. It also forms just one part of a broader landscape we watch closely. We remain energized by frontier research directions that also engage with partially understood, emergent capabilities of large-scale AI. For example, we’re fascinated by forward-dynamics world models that enable agents to learn by imagining future scenarios, as well as continual learning architectures and hybrid systems that emulate the sophisticated hierarchies of human memory. The path to recursive self-improvement and superintelligence is neither straight nor settled, and we plan to invest across its most consequential turns. Still, we see an acute, underserved need for verified intelligence in massive markets, sometimes with human lives on the line. We’re excited to partner with Code Metal as they meet this need.

 

An Exceptional Team

Code Metal’s leaders are second-time founders with deep experience across aerospace, defense, and advanced AI systems. CEO Peter Morales previously developed AI reasoning systems for the F-35 and was a founding member of the AI Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. CTO Alex Showalter-Bucher, also a Lincoln Lab alumnus, brings more than a decade of experience across defense agencies and technical leadership roles. Peter and Alex have felt the pain of translating and verifying mission-critical systems and know what it takes to earn trust in these markets.

The company has assembled an uncommonly strong bench of researchers and engineers from organizations including Intel, NASA, MathWorks, Lightmatter, and OpenAI. The team’s expertise bridges compilers, formal methods, AI systems, and high-stakes deployment environments. They’ve also proven they can sell and scale, building a winning culture.

 

Our Investment

B Capital invested in Code Metal’s Series B. We are proud to partner with the entire Code Metal team on this journey. Learn more at codemetal.ai or in WIRED here.

 

 

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