Blacksmith has raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the AI code-testing startup at $550 million, according to TechCrunch. The report says the valuation is up from $60 million when Blacksmith raised a $10 million Series A less than a year ago. Techmeme also surfaced the financing, citing TechCrunch’s report. The round also included existing investors GV and Y Combinator, TechCrunch reports. The new financing brings Blacksmith’s total funding to $58.5 million. Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and verify software before code reaches production, according to TechCrunch. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash told the outlet the company now has more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. That is up from more than 700 customers less than a year ago. The financing is tied to a specific pressure point in the AI coding cycle: code generation is getting faster, but software teams still need to validate what gets produced. TechCrunch frames Blacksmith’s opportunity around the rise of tools such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code, which can accelerate code creation while leaving quality checks as a constraint. Blacksmith began as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads, the build-and-test infrastructure companies use before software is shipped, according to TechCrunch. The startup has since added Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks. The company is reporting fast commercial growth, though not a precise current annual recurring revenue figure. TechCrunch says Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with 10 employees, has grown to about 30 employees, and now describes revenue as in the “tens of millions of dollars.” Jayaprakash also told the outlet that some of Blacksmith’s largest customers spend more than $1 million a year on the platform. The market is not empty. TechCrunch names GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation features within Codex and Claude Code, other startups, and AI code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as competitors or adjacent offerings. Jayaprakash told TechCrunch that Blacksmith is trying to compete on testing speed and affordability. Blacksmith’s stated next step is broader than test execution. According to TechCrunch, the company plans to expand into a wider set of coding tools aimed at helping developers write, validate, and merge software faster. For now, the reported funding round is a bet that validation infrastructure becomes more valuable as AI-generated code volume rises. Who benefits: Blacksmith gains capital and a sharply higher valuation as it tries to expand from continuous integration into broader coding tools. Peak XV led the round, while GV and Y Combinator participated, according to TechCrunch. Who's exposed: TechCrunch names GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, Codex and Claude Code validation capabilities, and services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as competitors or adjacent offerings. Jayaprakash told the outlet Blacksmith is competing on speed and affordability, but the degree of customer displacement is not established by the reports.