Blacksmith raises $45M as CI becomes the bottleneck

Blacksmith has raised $45 million in a Series B at a $550 million valuation, with its customer count growing from about 800 to more than 6,000 as AI coding tools produce more pull requests. Its funding announcement says CI jobs are rising 5% to 10% week over week and that the company manages hundreds of thousands of compute cores. The operator takeaway is a useful inversion: when agents make writing cheap, validation—not generation—becomes the scarce engineering capacity, the same harness economics tracked in the Octobench benchmark.