Legacy software, rebuilt beside the old one. Starting with six weeks.
ilucara rebuilds aging software products for PE-backed companies: one working slice at a time, running alongside the system your customers already use, for a fixed price. You see a real piece of the new product before you commit to the rest.
The position you're in
A good business on software nobody wants to touch.
Held past the plan
The asset is five, six, seven years in. The exit needs a growth story, and the product can't carry one.
A stack that fights back
Perl, C++, an old ERP with years of per-customer configuration. Every change is slow and every upgrade is an operational risk.
A rewrite you can't underwrite
A conventional rebuild is a multi-year check with nothing to show until the end. Running it flat isn't a plan either.
More than a quarter of PE-owned software companies in North America have been held five years or longer, and about one in nine for seven or more. Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence, 2026.
What changed
The economics of a rebuild are not what they were two years ago.
One senior principal directing a team of AI leads can read a legacy system, map what it actually does, and rebuild it far faster than a conventional team. That changes which assets are worth modernizing, and it means you can test the answer on one slice before you fund the rest.
How it runs
Four steps. Each one earns the next.
Every step has a fixed price agreed before it starts. You can stop after any of them and keep what was built.
Assessment
We read the code, the product and the customer configurations, map what the system really does, and rank what to rebuild first. You get a target architecture, a plan and a fixed quote. The fee is credited in full toward the next step.
The first slice
One real part of the product, rebuilt on a modern stack and running beside the legacy system on real data. It is the proof that the rest can be done, at a price you can approve without a board paper.
The rebuild
The rest of the product, slice by slice. Old and new run side by side throughout, so no customer has to move on your timetable and nothing depends on a single cut-over.
The owner
A Product Engine owns the modern product after launch: it ships, monitors, fixes and improves. One per portfolio company, on the same reference architecture each time.
Who does what
We rebuild the product. You keep the customers.
The migration is a commercial exercise, and your team already knows the market. We give them the playbook and stay out of the way.
ilucara
- Reads and maps the legacy system, including what the documentation never said
- Designs the target architecture
- Rebuilds, verifies and runs the new product
- Hands your team a reference migration playbook
Your company
- Owns the customers and the market
- Runs the migration through its own sales and success teams
- Decides the incentives to move, and the date the old system retires
- Approves every release, under access it controls
Why ilucara
Senior, onshore, and at home in private equity.
Inside the diligence
Cory has run technology due diligence on software companies for private-equity buyers as an executive technologist at Palo Alto Strategy Group, and rebuilt the firm's own diligence platform from a single-file prototype.
Twenty years on long-lived products
A record of 90% build-time reductions and 10x performance gains on products that had been running for years, at companies taken from founding through exit by both M&A and IPO.
One accountable owner
Austin-based. The person who scopes the work answers for it and is in the room. Not a rotating bench, and not an offshore team you manage yourself.
Get in touch
Bring one asset.
Thirty minutes. Tell me what it's built in, how long you've held it and what the exit needs. You'll leave with a view on whether it can be rebuilt and what the first six weeks would prove.