Peak XV (cc: @sjs_day1, @noahpbradford) is leading a $45M Series B round in Blacksmith (YC w24) - the leading platform for code infrastructure - alongside @snowmaker at YC and @ejn at Google Ventures. While it’s 10x faster and easier to write code, the infrastructure required to validate, test, secure, and deploy that code hasn’t kept up. Blacksmith is changing that. They sit at the intersection of three large markets: infrastructure, compute, and tokens - they’re growing VERY fast. Long thread: (1) AI code generation could be the largest software market ever: Spend has already crossed $50B ARR in the 3 years. All software is ultimately an abstraction of code. In 10 years, it’s possible token spend could still 100x as long-running background agents become capable of working autonomously for hours, days, and weeks and eventually one-shot entire applications. (2) The AI coding market will likely be fragmented: We are not intelligence-constrained for every token. We are seeing capable open-source models that are faster and cheaper for many tasks. Today, developers already use multiple coding harnesses and models simultaneously. (3) A massive new code execution, validation and infrastructure market is emerging. In a fragmented-model world, where we can write code 10x faster, the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to infrastructure and everything that happens after code is written. We saw a similar pattern in cloud and SaaS: observability, security and monitoring became huge downstream markets. There will be a similar wave in AI code, but likely bigger. As companies run agent swarms, long-running background agents across different model providers, the volume of code that needs to be executed, secured, tested, and validated will increase dramatically. Importantly, the companies that win this market will need to be agent-neutral and model-agnostic. (4) Blacksmith has the potential to become a defining developer infrastructure company. They already power the critical infrastructure for thousands of frontier, AI companies, including Exa, Serval, Reflection, Supabase, Mercury, Legora, Factory, Chroma, Granola, and many more. (5) Before starting Blacksmith @adijayaprakash, @aayush_shah15 and Aditya were engineers at Cockroach Labs, Faire, and Superblocks, working across core database, data distribution, and search infrastructure teams. They have assembled a rockstar infrastructure engineering team and have the ambition to build a world-class company. (6) This is only the beginning. Beyond its current products, Blacksmith has a super-ambitious roadmap across the code infrastructure stack (which will they launch soon). The amount of code being created is accelerating. The infrastructure stack needs to accelerate too. We are honored to work with this team. It’s going to be fun!