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

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.