Rocket Software buys six-person mainframe AI agent startup Geniez AI

Calcalist reports the price was not disclosed but estimates it at up to $100M. Geniez AI had six employees. The founders, CEO Gil Peleg and Dan Shprung, took the offer roughly a year after the company's September 2025 seed round, which was co-led by StageOne Ventures and Canapi Ventures. Both had earlier founded Model9, a mainframe data management company that BMC Software bought in 2023. Geniez builds agents that run directly on mainframes, watching live systems, diagnosing incidents and executing workflows from natural-language instructions. Its team joins Rocket Software, a Bain Capital portfolio company with more than 3,000 employees and 13,500 customers, and the technology feeds Rocket EVA, its agentic platform for core systems. Rocket cites a shortage of skilled mainframe staff as the driver. For AI builders, the deal shows that incumbents in legacy infrastructure will pay for narrow agent teams with domain credibility rather than build in-house. A six-person team with a prior exit and a niche in regulated finance workloads drew an estimated nine-figure price, which is a useful comparable for vertical agent startups.