We raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV in March, valuing @useblacksmith at $550M. We somehow never got around to announcing it until now; this year has been pretty busy. One thing I’ve been thinking about is how we were both right and wrong about what was coming. When we raised our Series A in April 2025, we believed AI was going to lead to a lot more code being written, and that all of that code would still need to be built, tested, and validated before it could be merged. That part was right, but what we underestimated was how fast it would happen. I have a suspicion that something changed over the holidays. Opus 4.5 came out in November; a lot of developers had time to really use Claude Code over the holidays. I think a lot of people who were still skeptical went back to work in January having fully embraced it. Since the start of the year, the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith has grown more than 7x. We see customers adopt coding agents, produce way more PRs, and then run into the next problem: how do you actually validate all of this code and get it merged? There are a lot of people working on making code easier to produce. What I find strange is how little attention goes into everything that has to happen after the code is written and before it can be merged. The labs and hyperscalers are mostly focused elsewhere, yet developers and agents spend an enormous fraction of their time here. A lot of companies touch parts of this problem. For us, it’s *the* problem. We started Blacksmith by building a much better CI cloud, but ultimately what we care about is helping developers and agents validate and merge code faster. I sometimes tell candidates that if we don’t solve the whole thing, I’m not sure who will. I don’t think we fully appreciate yet how much more software is going to be produced. The infrastructure we have today wasn’t designed for that volume. There’s a lot we need to rethink from first principles, and I think we’re barely scratching the surface. If you’re extremely good at what you do and this is a problem you want to spend the next several years working on, we’re hiring in SF and NYC: