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An artificial intelligence startup called Hypercubic Inc. is taking on the problem of modernizing legacy applications written in the COBOL programming language after raising $5.3 million in seed funding today. The round was led by CIV and saw participation from Y Combinator, Afore Capital, Pioneer Fund, Multimodal Investors and angels including Opendoor Chief Executive Kaz Nejatian and former Amazon Marketplace engineer and Walmart Labs co-founder Venky Harinarayan. Hypercubic is the brainchild of former Apple Inc. engineers Sai Gurrapu and Aayush Narik. They’ve hit upon the idea of using AI agents to perform the heavy lifting of reading, documenting and then rewriting decades-old COBOL codebases, which is a major headache that continues to stump many of the world’s largest financial institutions and industrial companies. COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is one of the most ancient widely used programming languages in the world today. It was first written in 1959, and is specifically designed for processing business and financial data. Despite its age, it’s still incredibly popular, with an estimated 200 billion-plus lines of COBOL code supporting more than 95% of the world’s swipe transactions and automated teller machines. So it still works, but the problem is that there are very few programmers around who can understand it. The original generation of COBOL developers retired from the workforce decades ago, and now their successors are also aging out. One estimate suggests that 90% of current COBOL engineers are expected to retire within the next five to 10 years, and that’s going to create massive problems for any business that still has critical systems based on the language. The solution is to modernize those applications and write them in a modern language that younger engineers understand, such as Java. But doing so is a mammoth and extremely risky undertaking. A single undocumented change in a monolithic COBOL program could cause critical services such as a bank’s ledger or a government’s social security payments system to crash, and it could take days to identify the problem and fix it. COBOL has often been likened to asbestos. Just as that toxic material is extremely difficult to remove from old buildings, COBOL is deeply embedded in massive, vertically integrated mainframe stacks, and replacing it involves redesigning everything from the data architecture to the storage and transaction processing. Rewriting COBOL manually is a years-long effort that most organizations keep putting off because of the expense and the massive risk involved. Hypercubic wants to convince those companies that its autonomous AI agents can finally solve their problems by automating the entire COBOL modernization process. They’re powered by models that have been trained on massive volumes of COBOL code and they also know how to rewrite all of its specific functions in modern programming languages. When they start out with a new COBOL application that needs to be modernized, they map the entire codebase first of all. While doing this, they recover all of the business logic that’s buried inside that code, and then use this information to automatically generate the documentation for it, which has never previously been written. “The problem is not simply translating COBOL syntax,” Gurrapu said. “The real challenge is recovering decades of hidden business logic, understanding how systems behave in production, and proving that a modern replacement preserves what matters.” Using this AI-generated documentation, it then becomes much easier to generate the modern code needed to create an identical replica of the original app, complete with all of its historical data. According to Gurrapu, Hypercubic’s agents can completely modernize legacy apps in just a couple of months, as opposed to the years required for manual transformation. “We are building agents to make that work dramatically faster and more reliable,” Gurrapu said. The startup is already working with one of the largest banks in Latin America, as well as a leading Caribbean retailer that serves more than 50 million customers annually, to revamp their most critical applications. With today’s funding, it’s going to invest in building out the capabilities of its AI agents and also expand its capacity to serve even more enterprise customers. Image: Hypercubic A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. 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