Hungarian-founded Kodesage has closed a $6.6 million seed funding round (about two billion forints) led by Greece-based VentureFriends, the company told Forbes.hu. Existing investor PortfoLion also participated, and several angel investors joined the round, including Christian Szegedy and Mario Götze.
Christian Szegedy, an AI expert and mathematician associated with Elon Musk’s xAI as a co-founder, entered the round as an angel investor. Mario Götze, the German World Cup–winning footballer, also joined as an angel: Kodesage reached Szegedy through a mathematician network connected to one of the co-founders, while Götze was identified as a potential investor by staff at his personal fund. Co-founder Szilágyi György recalled that he initially thought the LinkedIn contact from a “Mario Götze” might be a scam until they were formally approached.
There was a small competition for lead investor status; VentureFriends was chosen not only for a more favorable financial structure but also because the Greek team, like Kodesage’s founders, had recently been in company-building roles themselves. The company says the fresh capital will be used primarily to accelerate expansion in the US and Europe, advance product development, and grow the team.
What Kodesage does
Kodesage’s AI-supported platform automates and simplifies the modernization of enterprise legacy software systems while maintaining high data security standards. The system automatically analyzes complex codebases, creates and maintains documentation, supports code migration, automates testing processes, and provides operational support with on-premise (locally running) AI models.
In a company statement, co-founder Dombi Gergely highlighted that software modernization is a complex, lengthy process: old and new systems often run side by side for years while operational burden increases as institutional knowledge is lost. The company argues this creates hidden costs in the trillions of dollars for businesses.
Kodesage’s long-term goal is to build self-healing enterprise applications in which autonomous AI performs software development, testing, and repair; engineers’ roles would increasingly shift toward supervision and approval.
Founders and background
Kodesage was founded in 2024 by Dombi Gergely, Szurdi Miklós and Szilágyi György. Dombi and Szurdi previously built Sonrisa, a software development firm of more than 300 people focused on legacy system modernization — experience that inspired the Kodesage product. Szilágyi was a co-founder of Tresorit, which he helped scale into a global tech company that Swiss Post Digital acquired in 2021.
The company says that at the time of the first funding round it was still more research-focused; since then they have built a team and a product, and iterated the business model several times. They identified that specializing within legacy systems leads to faster growth, and today the platform focuses on modernizing Oracle systems alongside the core product.
According to Kodesage’s website, clients include Lufthansa Systems, Waberer’s, Magyar Nemzeti Bank, Rail Cargo Group and Hold Alapkezelő.
Market context and next steps
Many regulated industries — such as banking, insurance, energy and the public sector — still rely on systems developed decades ago to run core processes. Modernization is often hampered by incomplete documentation, retiring experts’ lost knowledge, and strict data-security requirements. Kodesage’s platform supports migrations from old technologies to modern platforms, automatic documentation generation, test-case generation and preparation of bug-fix processes; the company claims some migration projects can be executed up to three times faster using its technology.
While emphasizing AI-driven efficiency, Kodesage says it continues to value in-person collaboration. The team has grown to about twenty people, with offices in Budapest and London and employees working in the United States.
Photo caption: Szurdi Miklós, Dombi Gergely and Szilágyi György, Kodesage founders. Photo: Ránki Dániel
