The London and Budapest startup runs its modernisation AI entirely on-premise, aimed at the banks and insurers whose core systems still run on COBOL and Oracle Forms.
The most important software in a bank is often the software nobody fully understands any more. It runs the core processes, it has run them for decades, and the engineers who wrote it have retired. Changing it is slow, expensive and risky, which is why so much of it never changes at all. Kodesage wants to fix that, and on Thursday it raised $6.6M to try.
The seed round is led by VentureFriends, with pre-seed lead Portfolion returning and a notably eclectic group of angels alongside them: Christian Szegedy, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI, and Mario Götze, the footballer who scored the goal that won Germany the 2014 World Cup. It follows a roughly €2.3M pre-seed the company raised in early 2025.
Kodesage, based in London and Budapest, was founded in 2024 by Gergely Dombi, Miklos Szurdi and Gyorgy Szilagyi. The pedigree matters to the pitch. Dombi and Szurdi had built a 300-plus-person consultancy that specialised in exactly this work, modernising legacy systems, and watched it run into the same wall every time: projects that dragged on for years because the knowledge lived in a handful of specialists’ heads. Szilagyi was a co-founder of Tresorit, the encrypted-storage company Swiss Post acquired in 2021.
