Code Metal: Rewriting the Code Behind National Security
Notes de l’épisode
AI made writing code cheap. Verifying it is the new bottleneck.
Peter Morales, CEO and co-founder of Code Metal, joins Maggie Gray and Pat O'Reilly to talk about modernizing the legacy code running US national security — and why formal verification is the durable moat in an era of commodity AI code generation.
Founded in 2023, Code Metal has raised ~$200M and signed contracts with the US Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba. Projects that used to take engineering teams months now take minutes.
In this episode:
- Why US weapons systems still run on COBOL, Fortran, and Ada
- How Code Metal pairs LLMs with formal verification for safety-critical code
- Why the verification layer is more valuable than the model itself
- Peter's advice for founders building in defense tech
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(2:10) Why would you want translate code?
(4:11) How does Code Metal accelerate this process?
(5:27) Customer interest in Code Metal
(6:22) Outdated weapons systems programming language
(8:39) Code Metal's formula
(12:14) How does Code Metal choose a model to use
(14:11) Lessons learned from working in international markets
(15:20) Navigating commercial and government customers
(18:03) Getting approval to work with classified customers
(19:46) Customer success stories
(23:06) Building trust with mission-critical customers
(24:10) Why did you decide to start your own company?
(26:22) How do you approach recruitment for working in a startup?
(28:47) Biggest changes in defense space over Peter's career
(30:11) Advice for founders and investors to leverage a board
(32:16) Lessons from Ukraine and Middle East conflicts
(33:10) Subcontracting as a way to gain access to larger contracts
(34:39) What's next for Code Metal?
(35:38) Biggest surprised building Code Metal
(36:19) Advice for founders building in the national security domain