legacy-modernization
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The 6,000-Engineer Firm That Bet Its Whole Business on Treating People Like People
For nearly three decades DataArt has quietly engineered the software behind trading floors, booking engines, and clinical trials - and it did it by building the company around retaining people, not just billing hours.
Hexaware Technologies
How a spin-off from an Indian computer-training business became a 32,000-person, AI-first services firm - and pulled off the biggest technology-services IPO in over a decade.
Neutrinos
The Singapore startup betting that insurers do not need to replace their aging core systems - they need software smart enough to work around them.
Virtusa
The 1996 startup that bet enterprises would move their software off-premise now runs on an 'Engineering First' creed - and is wiring generative AI into banks, insurers and hospitals that can't afford to guess.
Audax Labs
The Seattle-area technology company pairs consulting muscle with a shelf of homegrown products - betting that enterprise transformation works better when the people drawing the blueprint can also build the machinery.
FlowX.AI
FlowX.AI is an AI-native platform that helps large banks, insurers and other regulated enterprises deploy production-grade AI agents on top of their existing legacy systems - without ripping out core infrastructure. Founded in 2021 by Ioan Iacob, Radu Cautis and Serban Chiricescu, the company pairs a Delaware headquarters with an engineering base in Bucharest, Romania. It offers 140+ ready-made agents across lending, onboarding, claims and compliance, and in 2023 raised a $35M Series A led by Dawn Capital - reported as Romania's largest Series A at the time.
N5 Now
N5 Now is a Buenos Aires-founded software company built specifically for the financial industry. Its 'systematics' platform - along with AI products AIfred, Pep and Singular - lets banks, insurers and payment companies connect CRM, campaigns, analytics, compliance and omnichannel operations on top of existing legacy systems instead of replacing them. Founded in 2017 by former Santander executive Julian Colombo, N5 works fully remotely across teams in dozens of cities, serves clients including Santander, Mastercard, Itau, Interbank and Zurich in roughly 15-18 countries, and closed a $20M Series A in 2025 to accelerate its AI agents for banks.
Ioan Iacob
Ioan Iacob is the founder and CEO of FlowX.AI, an AI-native platform that helps large banks and insurers modernize mission-critical software in weeks instead of years. A Romanian engineer and repeat entrepreneur, he earned a computer science degree from Politehnica University of Bucharest, worked at companies including Adobe and IBM, and co-founded the tech services firm Qualitance before launching FlowX.AI in 2021. In 2023 the company raised a $35 million Series A led by Dawn Capital, at the time reported as the largest enterprise-software Series A in Europe in two years. His pitch is blunt: bring real innovation to the enterprise software that quietly runs the world.
EffectiveSoft
EffectiveSoft is an AI-enabled software engineering company that builds, modernizes, and scales digital products and enterprise systems. Founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Diego, California, with development centers across Poland and other locations, the firm delivers full-cycle custom software development, AI and generative AI integration, cloud engineering, and data services. It is best known for deep, long-running engagements in highly regulated industries - healthcare, financial services, and fintech - and for pairing more than two decades of engineering experience with modern AI practice.
EvolveWare, Inc.
EvolveWare is a Santa Clara, California software company that automates the documentation, analysis and modernization of legacy software applications. Its AI-enhanced Intellisys platform - built on more than two decades of custom-trained machine-learning technology and protected by multiple U.S. patents - extracts business rules and transforms code from 20+ legacy languages such as COBOL, PL/I and RPG into modern Java and C#. Founded in 2001 and bootstrapped since, EvolveWare serves government agencies and large enterprises including the U.S. Department of Defense, the State of New York, Deloitte and KPMG.
Fresche Solutions
Fresche Solutions is a Montreal-based enterprise software and services company that helps organizations manage, maintain, and modernize their IBM i (AS/400) and Microsoft systems. With more than 40 years of IBM i heritage, Fresche combines proprietary modernization tools such as X-Analysis, Presto, and Newlook with managed services, cloud hosting, and AI-driven data analytics to help legacy-dependent businesses move to modern web UIs, contemporary languages, and cloud platforms without disrupting operations.
8090
8090 is an AI-native software factory that helps regulated enterprises build and modernize production software using teams of people working alongside AI agents. Founded by Chamath Palihapitiya in January 2024 and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, its flagship Software Factory platform runs the full software development lifecycle - from business intent to production code - through five modules (Refinery, Foundry, Planner, Assembler, Validator) while preserving the documentation, oversight and audit trails that regulated industries require. The company raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures in June 2026, with Chamath stepping in as full-time CEO.
Appeon
Appeon is a San Francisco software company that develops, sells, and supports PowerBuilder, the veteran rapid application development platform it took over from SAP in 2016. Through PowerBuilder, PowerServer, InfoMaker, and its CloudPro bundle, Appeon helps enterprises build data-driven business apps and modernize decades-old client/server systems into cloud-native and C#/.NET applications - protecting existing code investments rather than forcing full rewrites.
Nova Intelligence
Nova Intelligence builds an agentic AI platform purpose-built for SAP teams. Its AI agents analyze, document, modernize, and generate the custom code that runs payroll, supply chains, and finance inside Fortune 500 systems, mapping legacy custom code to SAP standard to cut complexity and cost. Founded in 2024 by a Google DeepMind researcher, a repeat founder, and the co-inventor of SAP HANA, Nova targets the roughly $89 billion S/4HANA migration wave companies must complete by 2030. It has raised $40M total, including a $31.5M Series A led by Chemistry.
Emma Qian
Emma Qian is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Intelligence, a San Francisco startup building an agentic AI platform that analyzes, modernizes, and generates custom code for SAP systems. A former research engineer at Google DeepMind and software engineer at Meta AI, Caltech-trained Qian left frontier AI research to attack one of enterprise software's least glamorous and most expensive problems: the migration of decades of custom SAP code to S/4HANA. Nova has raised over $40 million, including a $31.5 million Series A led by Chemistry with backing from Accel, Conviction, and SAP.io, and counts customers like Festo who report working roughly five times faster. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Softjourn
Softjourn is a full-cycle software development and IT consulting company founded in 2001, headquartered in Fremont, California (Silicon Valley) with research and development offices in Ukraine, Poland, and Brazil. With 200-300 engineers and consultants, it builds custom software for three core verticals - Fintech and Cards & Payments, Event Ticketing, and Media & Entertainment - offering services from product design and development to QA, DevOps, AI/ML, blockchain, and dedicated development teams. Clients include Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Vendini, SecuTix, eTix, and PEX, and the firm has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list multiple years running.
Rhino.ai
Rhino.ai is a Washington, D.C.-based enterprise AI platform that reconstructs the hidden business logic buried inside legacy code, ERP systems, SaaS tools, workflows, and integrations. Using agentic AI paired with human expertise, it discovers and maps business rules, organizes them into a governed, version-controlled logic graph built on its proprietary Universal Application Notation (UAN), and uses that single source of truth to accelerate modernization and application development. Founded in 2023 by Adam Branch, the company raised a $50M Series A in January 2025 led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with KPMG as a strategic minority investor.
InfrasAI
InfrasAI (formerly iLife Technologies) is a Sunnyvale-based AI infrastructure company that builds the plumbing behind modern insurance distribution. Their headless API platform lets insurance carriers connect to any distributor channel - agents, brokers, IMOs - without rebuilding integrations from scratch each time. The core bet: use agentic AI to auto-generate workflows from natural language, collapsing integration timelines from 24 weeks to about 2. Customers include Transamerica and Guardian Insurance. Backed by Foundation Capital, Brewer Lane Ventures, SCOR, and others, InfrasAI has raised $28M total.
Nelson Lee
Nelson Lee is the Founder and CEO of InfrasAI (formerly iLife Technologies), an AI-powered workflow infrastructure company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Drawing on early stints at Tencent and J.P. Morgan and participation in Stanford's Idea-to-Market program, Lee spent years mapping the fragmentation inside insurance distribution before building infrastructure to fix it. InfrasAI's headless connectivity platform decouples business logic from user interfaces, enabling insurance carriers to deploy workflows across any distributor channel without rebuilding backend systems - reducing maintenance costs by up to 60% and accelerating deployment speed by up to 70%. Backed by $21M in funding led by Foundation Capital and top insurtech investors, the company serves enterprise clients including Transamerica and Guardian across life, annuities, group benefits, disability, and wealth management.
Joe Zarrehparvar
Joe Zarrehparvar is the President and CEO of Fresche Solutions, a Montreal-based IT advisory and modernization company specializing in IBM i (AS/400) systems serving 22,000+ global clients. A 30-year technology veteran who built his career at Microsoft, Juniper Networks, and Wicresoft, Zarrehparvar took the helm at Fresche in May 2023 and has since driven a wave of AI-powered modernization tools, strategic partnerships with IBM, and a transition to subscription-based service models - all while championing a platform-neutral approach that lets clients modernize on their own terms.