Some startups chase the noise of now. Geniez AI is chasing the gap no one else has the guts to close. The New York-based startup just locked in $6 million in seed funding, co-led by StageOne Ventures and Canapi Ventures, to tackle a problem most enterprises have spent decades ignoring: how do you make mainframes, the backbone of global finance, healthcare, and government, work seamlessly with AI without ripping out the pipes?
Geniez AI, incorporated in Israel on August 20, 2025, with operations in New York City, is building a framework that does exactly that. Their software runs directly on mainframes and uses the Model Content Protocol to expose real-time transactional and historical data to modern LLMs and AI agents. No migration. No duplication. Just a direct line between legacy iron and the most advanced AI models in the game, OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama. Enterprises can run automation, analytics, and decision-making on their most critical systems without touching the trust layer that keeps the world running.
This isn’t the first time the founding team has pulled off a mainframe play. Co-founder and CEO Gil Peleg built Model9 into a serious modernization contender before selling it to BMC Software in 2023. He holds multiple mainframe patents and spent two decades in the trenches at IBM, INFINIDAT, and BMC. Co-founder and CRO Dan Shprung scaled Model9’s revenue from under $100K to tens of millions before moving into enterprise sales leadership at BMC. Together, they’ve already proven they can turn mainframe headaches into venture-backed exits.
The investors aren’t betting on a dream, they’re betting on a replay. Yuval Cohen of StageOne Ventures sat on the Model9 board for six years and knows the DNA of this team. Neil Underwood of Canapi Ventures, co-founder of Live Oak Bank and a veteran of scaling fintech platforms like nCino, doesn’t write seed checks unless the addressable market is undeniable. And with 70 percent of global IT workloads on mainframes, 43 of the top 50 banks running on them, and 90 percent of credit card transactions processed through them, the opportunity isn’t just undeniable, it’s massive.
The $6 million will go to engineering hires, go-to-market expansion, and integrations across the AI ecosystem. Geniez AI isn’t trying to bulldoze mainframes. They’re trying to unlock them, making decades of mission-critical data instantly accessible to AI without breaking compliance or SLAs. The business takeaway is clear: sometimes the winning move isn’t disruption by destruction but innovation by connection.
