Verified Code for Mission-Critical Systems
Our investment in Code Metal.
February 19, 2026
- Founder: Peter Morales
- Sectors: AI Infrastructure, Defense Technology
- Location: Boston, Washington D.C., San Francisco
The Infrastructure Debt Crisis
The world’s most critical systems — defense platforms, semiconductor toolchains, automotive sensors, aerospace avionics — are built on decades-old code. Much of this software was written in languages like C, C++, MATLAB, and ADA, tightly coupled to CPU architectures and bespoke hardware never designed for modern AI workloads. As compute paradigms shift from CPU-centric to GPU-accelerated and edge-deployed systems, organizations face a compounding crisis: massive technical debt that cannot be rewritten from scratch, an acute shortage of engineers fluent across legacy and modern stacks, and high-stakes environments where correctness matters more than velocity.
Manual code rewrites are slow, risky, and unscalable. Traditional compilers lack semantic understanding. AI coding assistants optimize developer productivity but cannot reason over system-level invariants or provide formal correctness guarantees. Critical institutions — from chip manufacturers to aerospace companies to the military itself — are bottlenecked by their ability to safely translate and evolve software across architectures.
Code Metal: Closing the Trust Gap
Code Metal is tackling one of the most important challenges in software development today: closing the trust gap for mission-critical industries. Particularly as AI-generated code proliferates, the question isn’t whether AI can write code — it’s whether that code can be trusted in environments where failure isn’t an option.
Code Metal has built something fundamentally different: a neuro-symbolic platform that marries generative AI with formal verification. Rather than just predicting the next token, Code Metal breaks programs down into testable, symbolic components to mathematically prove that generated code is functionally equivalent to the source and free of safety violations. This approach serves as a verification system for hardware code, particularly in industries where zero error is the default.
The company’s proprietary research enables Code Metal to solve transpilation problems significantly faster than competing formal tools while dramatically reducing manual implementation effort. Their team — led by co-founders Peter Morales and Alex Showalter-Bucher, who possess deep F-35 and defense systems experience from their time at MIT’s Lincoln Lab — has assembled the deepest private-sector bench in formal methods and safety-critical systems, including the developer of the MATLAB compiler and NASA’s global leader in formal verification research. Further, Code Metal has demonstrated exceptional velocity in its first year of commercialization, securing customers including L3Harris, Raytheon, and the U.S. Air Force.
Our Belief in Code Metal
By the time we met Peter Morales last November, we’d already heard effusive praise about his team and product from dozens of friends, co-investors, and portfolio companies. In less than 2 years, Peter and his team have built a product that engineers working on the world’s most mission-critical systems are already using to automate code translation, validation, and modernization. Spending time with Peter in D.C. confirmed what we’d heard: this was a rare, generational company that we’d feel fortunate to partner with.
We’re thrilled today to be leading Code Metal’s $125M Series B at a $1.25B post-money valuation alongside Accel, B Capital, as well as Shield Capital, Smith Point Capital, RTX Ventures, and others who have partnered with Code Metal from Day 1.
What’s Next
Code Metal is positioned to become the default platform for verified code translation across the edge, AI/cloud migration, and regulated industries. With a rare combination of world-class research talent, formal verification IP, and exceptional early traction across the automotive, aerospace, defense, and semiconductor industries, we believe Code Metal is building pick-and-shovel infrastructure for the next era of AI-native software development.
As AI moves to the edge and into the physical world — and as defense and national security organizations accelerate AI-driven modernization — the ability to safely, verifiably, and rapidly translate code across languages, architectures, and deployment targets becomes strategic infrastructure. Code Metal has built exactly that.
We’re excited to be part of this journey. Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Code Metal!
