Good morning ☀️, leader of the next generation.

We will talk about agents. AI agents.

They will change the way how we do business, how we interract and even how we do our everyday lives.

Agents will build business.

Agents will organize your day.

Agents will fill up your fridge.

I will let that sit in here for a while, so we can imagine and build the future together one agent at a time...

Blacksmith raises $45M as AI coding boom drives demand for software validation.

AI code-testing startup Blacksmith's valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year

AI tools have made writing code faster than ever — but verifying that code still lags behind. That gap is exactly what Blacksmith is building for, and investors are taking notice. The startup has closed a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, pushing its valuation to $550 million — nearly ten times the $60 million valuation it held less than a year ago when it raised a $10 million Series A. Existing backers GV and Y Combinator also joined the round, bringing total funding to $58.5 million.

Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps software teams build, test, and verify code before it ships to production. The company began as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads — the automated builds and tests that catch bugs early — and has since expanded its platform with Codesmith, an AI agent that can automatically fix failed code checks. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the startup now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. That figure is up sharply from more than 700 customers less than a year ago.

The growth comes as AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI's Codex, and Anthropic's Claude Code have made generating code far easier for development teams. But faster code creation has not automatically meant better code quality. "Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it's an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more," Jayaprakash said. Blacksmith is positioning itself as the layer that ensures all that AI-generated code actually works before it reaches users.

On the business side, Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees. The team has since grown to around 30 people, and revenue has climbed to what Jayaprakash described as "tens of millions of dollars," though he declined to give a specific updated figure. Some of its largest customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform — a sign that the product has moved well beyond early adoption into serious enterprise use.

Despite its momentum, Blacksmith faces stiff competition. GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, and validation features built into Codex and Claude Code all compete for the same market, as do cloud giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, which offer their own AI-assisted code-testing services. A number of well-funded startups are also targeting the same space. Jayaprakash said Blacksmith differentiates itself on two fronts: the speed at which it can run tests and its overall affordability compared with larger rivals.

Looking ahead, the company plans to broaden its offering beyond testing and validation into a fuller suite of developer tools — helping teams write, check, and merge code more efficiently from end to end. If the pace of AI-driven software development continues to accelerate, the market for tools that keep that code reliable looks set to grow with it.

European vibe-coding startup raises $400M at a $13.3 billion valuation.

Lovable confirms new $13.3B valuation, raises another $400M

Lovable has confirmed a $400 million Series C round, valuing the European vibe-coding startup at $13.3 billion. The round was led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund, with more than a dozen other investors joining. This follows a $330 million raise in December at half the current valuation, also led by Menlo Ventures.

The new funding arrives as Lovable reaches $500 million in annualized run rate revenue. The platform now hosts 60 million projects drawing 900 million monthly visitors.

To support its growth, Lovable has developed its own in-house AI model, signed a multiyear deal with Google Cloud, and has begun investing in other European startups, including Danish hardware-focused vibe-coding company Atech.

🎙️ The Supercharged Podcast Is Growing

Real Conversations with the People Building the AI Future

The Supercharged Podcast is quickly becoming a space for real, unfiltered conversations about AI — beyond the hype, tools, and surface-level takes.

Each episode dives deep with founders, operators, and builders who are actively working with AI — or building AI-first companies — to uncover how it's truly changing the way work gets done.

From strategy and systems to real-world execution, these conversations are practical, honest, and focused on what actually works — not just what sounds good.

⚡ Trends for the Future

How a $250 million acquisition collapsed into allegations of fraud and forged signatures

When VideoVerse announced its $250 million acquisition by international sports publisher Minute Media in September 2024, it seemed like a landmark moment for India's startup ecosystem. VideoVerse had built a genuine niche with its AI-powered clipping platform Magnifi, which automated the editing of long-form broadcasts into short social-media-ready clips for clients including the Indian Premier League, FIFA+, and Nippon TV. Minute Media saw it as a springboard into the lucrative U.S. sports market.

Less than a year later, the deal has completely unraveled. In May, Minute Media announced it was terminating its contract with VideoVerse, citing "significant discrepancies in VideoVerse's representations." Investors are still waiting for their share of the $250 million, and founder Vinayak Shrivastav now faces multiple legal actions across several jurisdictions. The two companies, it emerged, had continued operating as entirely separate legal entities even after the acquisition supposedly closed.

The legal complaints paint a troubling picture. Backer Bluestone Capital is suing for fraud, alleging VideoVerse refused to pay out acquisition proceeds. Investment firm Lingotto, which extended a $55 million loan to Shrivastav in October, says critical documents it received were forged — including a purported signature from Minute Media's own CEO and fabricated screenshots of bank balances. When a scheduled $4 million repayment failed to arrive in March, Lingotto called in the full loan and discovered a long queue of other creditors already waiting to be paid.

Former COO Sabya Das has added yet another layer of accusation, alleging in a separate case that Shrivastav forged his signature on loan and share-repurchase agreements to extract tens of millions of dollars from the company following the Minute Media deal. Shrivastav stepped down as CEO by the end of April. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and his most recently listed address is on the Palm Jumeirah islands in Dubai.

Tens of millions of dollars remain unaccounted for, and disputes over exactly how much is owed and to whom continue to multiply. The collapse is a stark reminder of how much startup dealmaking still depends on trust — and how catastrophically things can go wrong when that trust is misplaced.

⚡ Let’s Make AI Actually Useful:
What Would Move the Needle in *Your* Industry?

AI has potential — but generic advice rarely helps.

What would be genuinely valuable for AI to do in your industry right now?

• Automate a painful workflow?
• Improve decision-making?
• Replace a manual process that wastes time?
• Help your team upskill faster?

Tell us what you’d want AI to handle — or where you feel stuck.

We’re using these insights to curate **industry-specific trainings, live webinars, and practical guidance** you can actually apply.