The Mechanical Orchard executive team

At GV, we’re profoundly excited about AI’s potential to reinvent how enterprises develop, deploy, and evolve their software. The application of LLMs to this domain has yielded intense hype and enthusiasm, with some predicting the end of software developers and others, more optimistically, envisioning a world where copilots and agents enable every employee to become a citizen developer.

This tremendous opportunity is realized in Mechanical Orchard as they reliably solve problems enterprises have wrestled with for decades. Traditional attempts to modernize often fail and are expensive and unreliable. This is why the majority of the Fortune 500 still use on-premise infrastructure and monolithic applications written in decades-old languages.

Mechanical Orchard's experienced team rebuilds critical and complex systems into modern applications written from scratch, hosted, and secured in the cloud. Customers are equipped with the ability to rapidly add new features and win against the competition.

From banking and airlines to retail, healthcare, and government, teams working with Mechanical Orchard will finally be able to confidently move off of mainframes and COBOL while dramatically increasing the velocity, stability, and security of their mission-critical applications.

We believe this represents the most powerful combination for customers: Empowering customers with a novel approach and proprietary AI tailor-made for application modernization to finally move the world’s biggest companies into modern application architectures.

This means customers can overcome challenges that internal teams and traditional systems integrators have been unable to overcome, including:

• Complex and heterogeneous legacy applications dating back decades whose surface area and dependencies cannot be easily mapped out.
• Fragmented, incomplete documentation of said applications (and sometimes long-lost source code!).
• Loss of institutional knowledge as senior developers with knowledge of old systems and languages retire from the workforce.
• An unprecedented AI talent war that makes it difficult for traditional enterprises to attract and retain the right engineers for the job.
• Protracted or failed IT services engagements in the past that have damaged trust in external consultants’ ability to deliver on new applications.

Rob Mee, CEO and co-founder of Mechanical Orchard

Addressing these challenges demands a rare combination of engineering talent, cutting-edge technology, and deep credibility in building software and services for the largest enterprises. When we met Rob Mee, Matthew Work, and the rest of the Mechanical Orchard team, we quickly saw that they were creating an exceptional platform, technical team, and playbook for powering reliable, repeatable, and maintainable application modernization.

After many energizing meetings (and getting lost together on the Vegas Strip during Google Next), we convinced them to let us lead their $50M Series B. We are grateful to welcome them to the GV portfolio and partner with Mechanical Orchard on the adventure ahead!