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(6:22) Outdated weapons systems programming language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