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AI is helping developers write code faster. Now, someone needs to make sure all that code actually works.
AI code testing startup Blacksmith has raised $45 million in Series B funding at a $550 million valuation, in a round led by Peak XV Partners.
Before new code gets added to an app or website, developers usually run automated checks to make sure it works and hasn’t broken anything else. Blacksmith provides the cloud infrastructure to run these checks faster and cheaper.
The company claims companies can run these workflows up to 2x faster at half the cost.
Think of it as the quality-control line developers run their code through before shipping it to users.
And now comes AI: Blacksmith has expanded beyond simply running tests with Codesmith, its AI coding agent. When a code check fails, Codesmith can investigate the problem and automatically try to fix it. So instead of AI only writing more code, Blacksmith wants AI to help test and repair it too.
The new money will help the startup expand into more coding tools that make it faster for developers to write, check and merge software.
Why now: tools like Codex, Claude Code and Cursor are making it much easier to generate huge amounts of code. But more code also means more code that needs to be tested, debugged and validated before going live.
That is creating a new opportunity around the AI coding boom: building the tools that check the AI's homework.
Zoom out: India is already seeing this market heat up. TestMu AI, formerly LambdaTest, raised $38 million in 2024, while startups such as BotGauge AI and FinalRun are building AI agents that automate software testing.
And Bengaluru-based Emergent raised $130 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in July, with testing and debugging built into its AI app-development platform.
AI might be getting better at writing code. Making sure that code actually works could become a pretty big business too.
