Bringing \u201cagentic AI\u201d to the legacy code crisis<\/p>\n
When Aravind Jayendran looks at legacy software, he doesn\u2019t see lines of code. He sees drag.<\/p>\n
The Bengaluru-based founder and CEO of LatentForce has just secured a $1.7 million seed round to cut that weight loose. Using what the company calls \u201cagentic AI,\u201d LatentForce aims to transmute brittle, aging systems into modern enterprise software. The round was co-led by Ideaspring Capital and Yali Capital, funding that will push the startup\u2019s R&D beyond its Indian roots and into global markets.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost enterprises today are constrained by decades of accumulated technical debt,\u201d says Jayendran. \u201cCode migration is not just a coding problem; it is fundamentally a system transformation challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the lab to the enterprise<\/p>\n
Founded in 2024, LatentForce isn\u2019t a typical garage startup. It spun out of the Foundation for Science and Innovation Development at IISc Bangalore. The founding trio\u2014Jayendran, CTO Vinay Kyatham, and research lead Dr. Prathosh A P\u2014bring a heavy mix of deep generative models and academic rigor to a messy problem.<\/p>\n
While a thousand AI coding tools are currently pitching themselves as \u201ccopilots\u201d for individual developers, LatentForce is hunting bigger game. They are targeting the sprawling, undocumented monolithic systems that run global banks, insurers, and telecom giants. These are migration projects that usually span years, touch millions of lines of code, and burn through fortunes in consulting fees.<\/p>\n
LatentForce\u2019s bet is that modernizing these beasts isn\u2019t a chatbot problem; it\u2019s an orchestration problem.<\/p>\n
The startup is building deterministic migration pipelines using task-specific Small Language Models (SLMs). Instead of just generating new syntax, the platform refactors and validates code to match modern governance standards. The company claims this approach can slash the cost and time of major migrations by up to 80%.<\/p>\n
The philosophy: Continuity of intent<\/p>\n
Internally, the team frames modernization as translation without loss. Co-founder Prathosh argues that the real asset in legacy software isn\u2019t the syntax, but the business logic trapped inside it.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us, modernisation is not just rewriting code; it is continuity of intent, carrying forward the wisdom of the past into the architecture of the future without distortion,\u201d Prathosh explains.<\/p>\n
The system uses AI agents to map that logic and dependency graphs, proposing changes that upgrade the infrastructure while guaranteeing the software still behaves the way the business needs it to. Instead of armies of consultants combing through COBOL or Java line by line, LatentForce wants enterprises to treat modernization as a controlled pipeline designed to:<\/p>\n
Ingest and analyze complex dependency graphs.
\nTransform code using specialized Small Language Models.
\nVerify and deploy with strict governance controls.<\/p>\n
Engineering control at scale<\/p>\n
CTO Vinay Kyatham is blunt about why previous attempts at automated migration have failed.<\/p>\n
\u201cEnterprise migration projects fail not because of lack of intent, but because of loss of engineering control at scale,\u201d Kyatham says. \u201cWe built LatentForce to give teams deterministic pipelines, security by design, and the ability to modernise mission-critical systems with confidence rather than guesswork.\u201d<\/p>\n
That emphasis on control\u2014rather than just speed\u2014is the core pitch to CIOs who have been burned by multi-year transformation efforts that inevitably slip or balloon in budget.<\/p>\n
The $5 trillion problem<\/p>\n
The target market is massive, but crowded. LatentForce estimates the modernization sector at $22.7 billion today, while its investors cite a \u201c$5 trillion legacy code market\u201d\u2014a figure representing the economic value currently stuck in outdated mainframes and servers.<\/p>\n
Enterprises currently pour money into global systems integrators like Accenture and TCS to manage these transitions manually. Meanwhile, AWS, Microsoft, and GitHub are racing to deploy AI in the same space. LatentForce isn\u2019t trying to kill the consultants; it wants to be the tool they use. Ideally, it positions itself as the infrastructure layer for migration that SIs and internal teams plug into.<\/p>\n
Why the investors wrote the check<\/p>\n
For the backers, this is an infrastructure play. Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner at Ideaspring Capital, sees the combination of custom LLMs and graph engines as a potential shift for the sector, noting the platform\u2019s vertical integration.<\/p>\n
Yali Capital is banking on the team\u2019s technical depth. Ganapathy Subramaniam of Yali notes that \u201cAI-first deep-tech\u201d is central to their thesis, pointing to the founders\u2019 background in applied research as a key differentiator.<\/p>\n
LatentForce is already running pilots with developers in the BFSI and SaaS sectors across India and the US. However, like many seed-stage infrastructure plays, hard metrics\u2014customer names, pricing models, and volume of code migrated\u2014remain under wraps.<\/p>\n
The challenge now is proving repeatability. LatentForce has a focused thesis on one of tech\u2019s least glamorous problems. If they can turn the \u201cbrownfield mess\u201d of legacy debt into a clean, automated engineering process, they won\u2019t just be another AI tool; they will be the solution to every CIO\u2019s oldest headache.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bringing \u201cagentic AI\u201d to the legacy code crisis When Aravind Jayendran looks at legacy software, he doesn\u2019t see…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-326889","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}