US cloud infrastructure startup Blacksmith has raised $45 million in a Series B funding round led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million as AI-generated code creates growing demand for software validation infrastructure.

Existing investors Y Combinator and GV also participated in the round, which closed in March 2026 and was publicly announced on August 12. The financing brings Blacksmith’s total funding to $58.5 million, following a $3.5 million seed round and a $10 million Series A.

The company is scaling at a time when AI coding tools are accelerating software development but also increasing the volume of code that engineering teams must test and review before release.

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AI Coding Creates a New Infrastructure Bottleneck

Blacksmith said continuous integration, or CI, jobs running on its platform have grown between 5% and 10% each week since the beginning of 2026.

CI systems automatically build and test software changes, allowing developers to identify problems before new code is merged or released.

More than 6,000 companies now use Blacksmith, including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Mercury. That represents a sharp increase from roughly 800 organizations when the company announced its Series A in September 2025.

Blacksmith attributes part of that growth to the adoption of coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. As engineering teams use AI to produce more code and open more pull requests, the company sees validation becoming an increasingly important part of the development process.

Co-founder and CEO Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash said AI has made writing code considerably easier without creating the same improvement in validation.

Engineering teams adopting coding agents are generating several times more pull requests, he said, turning CI into a potential bottleneck because every piece of AI-generated code still needs to be built, tested and reviewed before deployment.

Building Infrastructure for Continuous Integration

Founded in 2024 by Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch.

The startup initially focused on infrastructure for GitHub Actions workloads, which developers use to automate software builds, testing and other development processes.

Blacksmith operates computing infrastructure specifically designed for CI workloads, combining dedicated computing resources with caching and storage systems intended to accelerate testing.

The company says developers can migrate existing GitHub Actions workflows to Blacksmith by changing a single line in a workflow file.

It also claims its hardware runs twice as fast while its service costs 60% less than GitHub-hosted runners, based on Blacksmith’s own comparisons.

Expanding into AI-Assisted Software Development

Blacksmith has expanded beyond CI infrastructure with Codesmith, a cloud-based coding agent that developers can use to delegate software development tasks.

The company says Codesmith can build features and fix bugs while operating within the broader software validation workflow.

Its Autofix feature monitors pull requests for failed CI checks and review feedback. When it detects an issue, the system can attempt to diagnose the problem, generate a fix and commit the resulting change.

Blacksmith is also developing Codesmith QA, which is designed to autonomously test software changes before they are merged.

Most of the Series B capital will go toward expanding the infrastructure required to support that growth. Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of computing cores and plans to increase capacity by approximately tenfold in the coming months.

The expansion reflects the company’s broader bet that as AI agents take on a larger share of software creation, the infrastructure responsible for validating their output will become an increasingly critical part of the development stack.

Yellow Card, a US-based stablecoin infrastructure company focused on Africa and other emerging markets, has raised $40 million in strategic funding from SC Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, and other strategic investors.

The latest investment brings Yellow Card’s total equity financing to more than $120 million. The company will use the capital to scale its Global USD Accounts, expand its stablecoin payment infrastructure, and deepen its presence across Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

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Scaling Global USD Accounts

Yellow Card’s Global USD Accounts provide businesses with a single platform for managing US dollars, holding and swapping stablecoins, managing treasury operations, and collecting or disbursing local currencies through domestic payment networks.

The company currently supports local payment rails across more than 50 countries, enabling businesses operating across multiple markets to manage cross-border financial operations through a unified infrastructure.

Yellow Card said the new funding will allow it to bring Global USD Accounts to more businesses while expanding local payment rails and currency coverage globally. Customers using its infrastructure include Visa and Western Union.

Connecting Banks to Stablecoin Infrastructure

Yellow Card is increasingly positioning itself as an infrastructure provider connecting traditional financial institutions and global businesses with stablecoin-based payment networks.

Chris Maurice, CEO and Co-Founder of Yellow Card, said the investment reflects confidence in the infrastructure the company has developed to help businesses move money without relying entirely on traditional correspondent banking networks.

Maurice added that connecting banks directly to stablecoin infrastructure represents a significant opportunity, potentially improving access to US dollars for businesses underserved by traditional cross-border banking systems.

From Africa to Global Markets

Founded by Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux, Yellow Card was created to make cross-border money movement more affordable and efficient, particularly in emerging markets.

The company has grown into one of Africa’s largest stablecoin on- and off-ramp infrastructure providers and now employs more than 200 people across 20 countries.

Yellow Card holds licences, authorisations, or registrations across 22 jurisdictions in North America, Europe, and Africa. It has facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions, supports over 50 currencies, and has partnerships spanning Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Coinbase.

Expanding Beyond Africa

Although Yellow Card built its business around African and emerging markets, the company is now accelerating its international expansion, particularly across Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

The new capital will support the development of additional domestic payment connections and currency coverage, strengthening the infrastructure that links its Global USD Accounts with markets worldwide.

Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, said stablecoin adoption will increasingly depend on reliable infrastructure and practical applications, highlighting Yellow Card’s role in enabling businesses across Africa to move value efficiently between markets.

Building Global Stablecoin Payment Rails

Yellow Card has gradually shifted its business model from primarily providing retail cryptocurrency access toward serving businesses and financial institutions.

The transition became increasingly visible around its $33 million Series C round in 2024, as the company focused on larger and more consistent transaction volumes generated by corporate customers.

With more than $120 million in total equity financing, Yellow Card aims to become an infrastructure layer connecting banks and businesses to stablecoin payment rails, supporting faster cross-border transactions and expanding access to dollar-based financial services across emerging and global markets.

DeepTech startup Discovered Materials has raised US$9 million in a Seed funding round led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, and several angel investors.

The round also attracted backing from prominent technology investors and entrepreneurs including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar.

Discovered Materials will use the fresh capital to expand its team and laboratory infrastructure while scaling its AI-powered research agents designed to accelerate the discovery and development of advanced semiconductor materials.

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Using AI to Accelerate Materials Discovery

Discovered Materials is developing an AI-powered research platform focused on discovering new materials for semiconductor chips.

Traditionally, developing and validating new materials for semiconductor manufacturing can take years of laboratory research and testing. The startup aims to shorten this process by combining artificial intelligence with materials science and experimental research.

Its AI research agents can help analyse potential materials, identify promising candidates and guide experimentation, allowing researchers to explore new material combinations more efficiently.

The company believes this approach could compress parts of the traditional materials research and development cycle from years into significantly shorter periods.

Tackling the Heat Challenge in AI Chips

One of Discovered Materials’ initial areas of focus is improving heat dissipation in advanced semiconductor chips.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving demand for increasingly powerful GPUs and other computing infrastructure, but higher computing performance also generates substantial amounts of heat.

Modern GPUs can reach heat densities of around 140 W/cm², making thermal management an increasingly important challenge for data centres and semiconductor manufacturers.

Discovered Materials is developing new thermal materials designed to transfer heat away from chips more effectively, potentially improving the performance and efficiency of advanced computing systems.

Supporting Next-Generation Chip Architectures

Improved thermal materials could also play an important role in emerging semiconductor technologies such as 3D chip stacking.

This architecture places multiple layers of semiconductor components on top of one another to increase computing density and performance. However, concentrating more components within a smaller physical area creates additional thermal management challenges.

By developing materials capable of dissipating heat more efficiently, Discovered Materials aims to help enable increasingly dense and powerful chip architectures.

Co-Founder Akash Ramdas said advances in computing have driven technological progress for decades, but current chips remain significantly less power-efficient than the human brain.

He added that the company has already developed new thermal materials that achieve performance comparable with products that took major chemical companies years to develop.

Lightspeed Backs AI-Driven Semiconductor Innovation

Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India Venture Partners, highlighted the growing materials challenge created by increasing demand for AI computing.

He said progress in semiconductor performance is increasingly constrained by the time required to move new materials from research into production.

Lightspeed sees Discovered Materials’ combination of materials science expertise and advanced AI engineering as an opportunity to accelerate this process, initially focusing on improved heat dissipation for increasingly powerful chips.

Scaling AI Research and Laboratory Infrastructure

The $9 million Seed round will allow Discovered Materials to increase its research capacity by expanding its laboratory, hiring additional talent and scaling its AI research agents.

The company’s broader objective is to create materials that can improve the efficiency and performance of next-generation semiconductor technology as demand for AI computing continues to increase.

By combining artificial intelligence with physical experimentation, Discovered Materials aims to accelerate materials innovation for advanced chips, data centres and emerging semiconductor architectures.