Swimm - AI-powered business rule extraction from legacy code

What is Swimm

Legacy code understanding represents one of the most significant challenges facing enterprises today. Organizations worldwide depend on millions of lines of COBOL, Java, and other programming languages that were often written decades ago, with critical business knowledge locked within codebases that only a handful of senior engineers fully comprehend. When these key personnel depart, organizations face substantial risks including operational disruptions, security vulnerabilities, and exponential technical debt accumulation.

Swimm addresses this challenge through an enterprise-grade AI-powered code understanding and documentation platform that combines deterministic code analysis with artificial intelligence. Unlike solutions that rely solely on large language models, Swimm employs a hybrid architecture that eliminates hallucination problems common in pure LLM approaches. The platform has successfully explained over 300 billion lines of code across its user base, with more than 1,200 teams currently utilizing the solution to accelerate their code exploration efforts.

The platform delivers a tenfold improvement in code exploration speed, enabling development teams to understand complex legacy systems in hours rather than weeks. This capability has earned Swimm recognition as a Gartner 2024 AI-Augmented Development and Testing Cool Vendor, validating its innovative approach to solving enterprise code comprehension challenges.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel with offices in New York, Swimm serves global enterprises across financial services, healthcare, insurance, and consulting industries. The company's investor base includes prominent venture capital firms such as Pitango, Insight Partners, and Dawn Capital, with advisory support from industry leaders including Guy Podjarny (founder of Snyk) and Renaud Visage (co-founder of Eventbrite).

Core Capabilities of Swimm

Swimm provides four fundamental capabilities that distinguish it from traditional documentation tools and generic AI coding assistants. These features work in concert to transform incomprehensible legacy codebases into actionable knowledge assets.

The first capability involves AI-powered static analysis that automatically examines code structure, architectural patterns, and hidden logic to construct comprehensive knowledge bases. This deterministic approach analyzes the actual code behavior rather than making probabilistic guesses, ensuring that every insight reflects what the code actually does. Organizations leverage this capability to understand the overall architecture of legacy systems without spending months manually tracing code execution paths.

The second capability delivers visual maps of entire codebases, automatically generating complete relationship diagrams showing programs, modules, screens, jobs, and their interconnections. Development teams use these visualizations to gain holistic views of system structures and identify critical components that require attention during modernization initiatives.

The third capability provides dependency analysis that traces user screens, variables, and job flows throughout the codebase. Unlike simple call graphs, Swimm's dependency analysis includes clear explanations and business context, enabling teams to understand not just what components connect, but why those connections exist and what business processes they support.

The fourth capability produces hallucination-free documentation by leveraging deterministic analysis as the foundation for AI-generated content. This hybrid approach ensures that every explanation, specification, and documentation piece accurately reflects the actual code behavior, making the platform suitable for enterprise environments where accuracy is non-negotiable.

Who Uses Swimm

Swimm serves diverse organizational roles and use cases across the enterprise, addressing specific pain points that different teams face when dealing with legacy systems.

Mainframe modernization teams represent a primary user segment. These organizations struggle with COBOL codebases that resist understanding, where business rules are embedded in programs written decades ago and maintained by ever-dwindling pools of senior engineers. Swimm's AI automatically analyzes this code, extracts business rules, and generates specification documents that accelerate modernization timelines by eliminating thousands of hours of manual research.

Enterprise knowledge transfer teams address critical succession planning challenges. When senior engineers retire, they take decades of accumulated business knowledge with them, leaving organizations vulnerable. Swimm creates living inventories that make implicit knowledge explicit, enabling non-technical team members to understand code and business logic without requiring years of tribal knowledge accumulation.

Legacy code maintenance teams rely on Swimm to reduce modification risks. Before making any code change, teams can review complete dependency relationships and clear contextual information, understanding exactly how modifications will cascade through the system. This capability transforms risky guesswork into informed decision-making.

Technical due diligence teams leverage Swimm during mergers and acquisitions to rapidly assess target system architectures. Rather than spending months with engineering teams trying to understand what acquired systems do, organizations can generate comprehensive architecture overviews and business rule documentation within days, accelerating decision processes and reducing acquisition risks.

System integrators, including Big 4 consulting firms, have achieved documented 50% efficiency improvements when using Swimm to understand client codebases quickly. This standardized output approach enables consulting teams to deliver value faster while maintaining consistent quality across engagements.

Compliance audit teams depend on Swimm's complete code knowledge bases and documentation audit trails to demonstrate code change traceability and understanding during SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other regulatory assessments.

Technical Architecture and Features

Swimm's technical architecture represents a deliberate engineering choice to combine deterministic code analysis with AI capabilities rather than relying exclusively on large language models. This hybrid approach delivers the scalability and natural language interface of AI while maintaining the accuracy guarantees that enterprise documentation requires.

The platform supports multiple programming languages including COBOL across various versions, Java, Python, and other enterprise languages. This broad language support enables organizations to centralize their code understanding efforts within a single platform regardless of their technology stack composition.

Deployment flexibility addresses the diverse security requirements of enterprise environments. Swimm offers cloud deployment for organizations seeking rapid implementation, on-premises deployment for those requiring local infrastructure control, and air-gapped deployment for high-security environments including government and financial institutions. This deployment versatility ensures organizations can adopt Swimm without compromising their security posture.

The platform integrates with major LLM providers including Azure OpenAI and OpenAI Enterprise while also supporting internal private LLM deployments. Organizations concerned about data sensitivity can utilize their own LLM instances, ensuring that sensitive code never leaves their network boundaries. This flexibility addresses a primary concern for enterprises in regulated industries where data residency requirements prohibit external API calls.

Performance characteristics enable processing of codebases containing millions of lines without degradation. The platform's proprietary technology scales horizontally to handle enterprise-scale deployments while maintaining response times suitable for interactive development workflows.

Security certifications validate the platform's suitability for regulated industries. Swimm maintains SOC 2 compliance demonstrating controls over data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Additionally, ISO 27001 certification provides international recognition for the organization's information security management system. Organizations can request these audit reports as needed to support their own compliance demonstrations.

Pricing Structure

Swimm employs a pricing model based on lines of code requiring understanding, providing organizations predictable costs aligned with their actual usage. This approach eliminates arbitrary user-count limitations and supports enterprise-scale deployments without unexpected scaling costs.

The platform structures pricing across several tiers designed to accommodate organizations ranging from mid-market companies to global enterprises. Smaller organizations with codebases under 500,000 lines can leverage entry-tier pricing that provides core platform capabilities including static analysis, visualization maps, and basic documentation generation. Mid-tier pricing supports codebases between 500,000 and 2 million lines, adding advanced dependency analysis and priority support. Enterprise pricing accommodates codebases exceeding 2 million lines with full platform access, dedicated success resources, and custom integration assistance.

System integrators receive project-based pricing that accommodates the variable nature of consulting engagements. This flexibility enables consulting firms to deploy Swimm across multiple client engagements without requiring enterprise-wide licensing commitments.

Proof of concept options allow organizations to validate platform capabilities against their specific use cases before committing to full deployment. The POC process demonstrates how Swimm handles the organization's particular codebase characteristics and addresses their prioritized use cases.

LLM selection remains flexible across all pricing tiers. Organizations can choose between OpenAI models, Azure OpenAI deployments, or their own internal LLM instances. This choice affects operational costs but does not impact Swimm platform licensing.

Security and compliance reports including SOC 2 and ISO 27001 documentation are available upon request at no additional cost, supporting organizations during their own vendor assessment processes.

Frequently Asked Questions