Hypercubic raises $5.3M to map out and rewrite legacy COBOL apps with AI agents

Hypercubic Inc., an artificial intelligence startup, has secured $5.3 million in seed funding to modernize legacy COBOL applications using AI agents. Led by CIV, the round included participation from Y Combinator, Afore Capital, Pioneer Fund, Multimodal Investors, and notable angels such as Kaz Nejatian and Venky Harinarayan. Hypercubic was founded by former Apple engineers Sai Gurrapu and Aayush Narik.

COBOL, a programming language first introduced in 1959, is still widely used in business and financial data processing, with estimates suggesting it supports over 95% of global swipe transactions and automated teller machines. However, there is a severe shortage of programmers familiar with COBOL, with 90% of current COBOL engineers expected to retire within the next five to ten years.

The startup aims to address this issue by utilizing AI agents to automate the process of modernizing COBOL codebases, which is typically a time-consuming and risky endeavor. Hypercubic's AI agents can map out the entire codebase, recover hidden business logic, generate documentation, and produce modern code to recreate the original application, all within a matter of months.

The company is already working with a major Latin American bank and a leading Caribbean retailer to modernize their critical applications, and the funding will be used to expand their AI agent capabilities and serve more enterprise customers.