Exclusive to EU-Startups: Budapest-based Kodesage, a startup specialising in AI-powered legacy software modernisation, has announced that it raised €2.3 million in pre-Seed funding to accelerate platform development.
The funding round was led by Portfolion Capital Partner, the VC and private equity arm of OTP Group, with participation from prominent angel investors, including three former UiPath executives.
“Legacy systems are outdated and painful to manage, yet they’re still mission-criticalfor enterprises. Replacing them outright is often impossible due to high costs and risks. That’s where Kodesage comes in: our technology empowers businesses to enhance and evolve these systems without the massive upheaval of full replacements,” said Gergely Dombi, Co-founder and CEO of Kodesage.
Founded in 2024 by Miklos Szurdi, Gergely Dombi, and Gyorgy Szilagyi, Kodesage’s AI-powered platform provides automated documentation, accelerates onboarding, and simplifies modernisation efforts, ensuring compliance and data security for enterprises.
Kodesage’s founding team brings hands-on experience with enterprise IT modernisation and software development. Gergely Dombi and Miklos Szurdi previously built Sonrisa, a 300-person consultancy specialising in legacy systems. Gyorgy Szilagyi, Co-founder of encrypted collaboration platform Tresorit (successfully exited in 2021), adds proven expertise in creating secure, enterprise-grade software.
This expertise has shaped Kodesage’s mission: to deliver an AI-powered platform that addresses the unique challenges of maintaining and upgrading legacy systems while minimising costs and risks.
With paying customers and active pilots, the funding will accelerate platform development and support the company’s mission to empower enterprises to enhance their most complex legacy systems.
“This is just the beginning. We’re excited to help enterprises break free from the constraints of legacy systems and unlock new opportunities for innovation,” added Dombi.
Kodesage aims to tackle a critical challenge in enterprise IT: understanding, maintaining, and modernising legacy systems. These systems, deeply embedded in enterprise workflows, present significant risks according to Kodesage, including outdated technology, poor documentation, dependence on key employees, and performance issues.
Enhancing them is essential for organisations to remain competitive, as outdated systems can hinder performance, increase security vulnerabilities, and drive-up maintenance costs. Maintaining these systems often requires continuous updates, patches, and ad hoc fixes from multiple sources, complicating employee training and escalating risks and expenses.
Kodesage argues that as organisations pursue digital transformation, the demand for AI-powered tools to streamline legacy system management and boost productivity has never been greater.
“At Kodesage, we believe understanding and modernizing legacy software shouldn’t feel like an endless uphill battle. Our AI-powered platform empowers teams to simplify and secure modernization efforts, allowing organizations to focus on building future-ready solutions instead of wrestling with technical debt,” said Dombi.
Kodesage aims to be a compass for engineers, revolutionising code navigation by providing the essential guidance needed to upgrade even the most complex legacy systems without any prior knowledge of the project. Built enterprise-first, the platform supports on-premise and air-gapped deployments, ensuring compliance and data security. Key benefits include:
- Modernisation and maintenance: Simplifying the maintenance of legacy systems and streamlining transformation projects as organizations execute lift-and-shift
migrations. - Automated documentation: Always up-to-date documentation that meets compliance requirements and lets engineers focus on building new solutions.
- Accelerated onboarding: New team members can quickly grasp complicated systems through AI solutions that can take the role of an experienced engineer when
explaining and mapping codebases.
“We’ve seen thousands of teams over the past two decades helping enterprises with their modernization efforts, focusing on what was productizable before the current generative AI wave. The AI toolkit that has emerged over the past two years has now opened up a new, even more painful part of the legacy stack for modernization in a venture-scalable way. We couldn’t be more excited to team up with such a perfectly assembled founder team György, Gergely, and Miki—to tackle this incredible opportunity,” said Márk Pálfalvi, Principal at PortfoLion.
With paying customers already on board and multiple pilots underway, Kodesage will use the funding to enhance its platform and scale its go-to-market efforts.
For now, Kodesage is building tools to assist human beings in navigating legacy systems. However, these tools are designed with the future in mind, laying the groundwork to eventually empower code agents to autonomously navigate and optimise codebases.