Code Metal: Rewriting the Code Behind National Security

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 (5:27) Customer interest in Code Metal (6:22) Outdated weapons systems programming language (8:39) Code Metal's formula (12:14) How does Code Metal choose a model to use (14:11) Lessons learned from working in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