Blacksmith went 10x in 11 months to a $550M valuation because AI-written code broke CI economics.

$45M Series B led by Peak XV with GV and Y Combinator, up from $60M at its September 2025 Series A, total funding $58.5M (TechCrunch). Customers grew from 700 to 5,000+ in under a year (Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, Expensify, some spending over $1M/yr), revenue from $10M ARR with 10 employees to "tens of millions" with ~30. CEO Aditya Jayaprakash's thesis is blunt: validating code is the bottleneck now that agents write most of it. They ship Codesmith, an agent that auto-fixes failed checks, competing directly with GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, and the validation built into Codex and Claude Code. This is the clearest instance of the second-order market: not selling AI code generation, selling the consequences of it.