Startup valuations are having a very loud August.
Blacksmith has raised $45 million in a Series B round led by Peak XV Partners, reaching a valuation of $550 million. The AI code-testing startup was valued at $60 million when it raised its $10 million Series A less than a year ago.
The valuation jump comes with a customer base that has grown from more than 700 to over 5,000. Blacksmith also reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with 10 employees, and its revenue has grown to “tens of millions of dollars.” Its largest customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform.
That growth points to a problem AI has made harder to ignore: more generated code still needs checking. “Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it’s an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more,” Aditya Jayaprakash said.
GV and Y Combinator are also investors in Blacksmith. The company’s latest round suggests that investors are assigning serious value to tools built around the less glamorous side of AI development—the part where software must survive contact with production.
Automation startups report sharp revenue growth
Naïve, which offers infrastructure for automating business setup, has scaled its annual run-rate revenue by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months. The company raised $28.5 million in a Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to roughly $32 million.
Y Combinator, Gokul Rajaram, Tim Zheng, and JD Sherman have also invested in Naïve. Sean Dorje, the company’s CEO and co-founder, is building in a market where business setup remains tied to many separate processes, systems, and controls. The revenue figure is the pitch in numerical form.
Fisent Technologies announced a $4.3 million USD investment round led by FINTOP, taking its total funding to $6.3 million USD, or $8.8 million CAD. The company operates in applied GenAI process automation and secured its first Fortune 50 customer in 2026.
Fisent grew revenue 206% year over year in 2025 and achieved 173% net revenue retention. It also recorded zero customer churn for the third consecutive year—an unusually clean metric in enterprise software, where customers often love a pilot and reconsider the subscription.
“Our customers are expanding BizAI across business functions because it delivers reliable outcomes within the systems and controls they already have,” Adrian Murray, Fisent’s Founder and CEO, said.
John Philpott, a Partner at FINTOP and incoming board member of Fisent, said, “Fisent has differentiated itself through production performance, hands-on enterprise enablement, expansion within large customers and a strong partner-led distribution model.”
Defense technology brings billion-dollar scale
Hadrian has raised $1.37 billion at an $8 billion valuation, placing the defense tech company in a different financial league from the software startups. Its previous Series C financing totaled $260 million and was led by Founders Fund and Lux Capital about a year ago.
Hadrian’s total funding now stands at around $2 billion. WCM Investment Management led the latest round, with Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, Baillie Gifford, 1789 Capital, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, Apollo, T. Rowe Price, CapitalG, and Andreessen Horowitz among the investors.
Hadrian also opened a facility in Alabama in March to mass-produce parts for submarines, whose value is listed at $2.4 billion. The company’s fundraising reflects a broader split in the current startup market: AI software is being rewarded for customer expansion and revenue, while defense technology is attracting capital tied to industrial capacity.
Across Blacksmith, Naïve, Fisent, and Hadrian, the numbers follow a familiar pattern. Customer growth, retention, production performance, and revenue are doing the persuading—though billion-dollar rounds remain a remarkably expensive way to make a point.
Based on
- AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year — techcrunch.com
- Naïve raises $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company | TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
- Fisent Technologies Accelerates Growth with $4.3 Million Venture Round to Expand Adoption of Applied GenAI Process Automation for Regulated Enterprises | Markets Insider — markets.businessinsider.com
- General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI | TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
- Defense tech Hadrian raises $1.37B at $8B valuation | TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
