As AI makes coding dramatically faster, the next big challenge in software development is testing and validating all that code. Blacksmith has raised a new $45 million round to capitalize on that shift.

The Series B, led by Peak XV Partners, values Blacksmith at $550 million, up from the $60 million valuation it was assigned when it raised a $10 million Series A less than a year ago. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing the startup’s total funding to $58.5 million.

Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and verify software before it reaches production. The startup now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify, up from more than 700 customers less than a year ago, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said in an exclusive interview.

The rise of AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code has made it significantly easier for software teams to generate code, but the quality of AI-generated code is not a given.

“Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it’s an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more,” Jayaprakash said.

Blacksmith started as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads, helping companies run the software builds and tests needed to validate code before it reaches production. The startup has since broadened its platform with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks.

Jayaprakash said Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since grown its workforce to about 30 and grown revenue to “tens of millions of dollars.” He declined to provide a specific updated ARR figure, though did say some of its largest customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform.

While that appears to be solid and fast progress, Blacksmith is operating in a crowded market. Its key competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation capabilities baked into Codex and Claude Code, numerous other startups, and AI code-testing services offered by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Jayaprakash said his startup is competing on the speed of testing code as well as affordability.

Looking ahead, Jayaprakash said that Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools, aiming to help developers write, validate, and merge software faster.

Lovable now aims to expand on its product and infrastructure, and wants to hire across offices globally.

AI vibe-coding start-up Lovable has tapped fresh funding from Scaleup Europe Fund and China’s Tencent in a round that values the Swedish company at $13.3bn.

The $400m Series C round was led by Menlo Ventures and co-led by the $5bn EQT-run EU fund. The raise doubles Lovable’s $6.6bn valuation from last December after a $330m Series B raise, also led by Menlo.

With big backers from across the world, including Balderton Capital, Europe’s Carmignac, World Innovation Lab, Accel, HubSpot and Salesforce, Lovable now aims to expand on its product, infrastructure and team as it looks to challenge the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.

Lovable enables users to build apps and websites using AI. Since its launch in late 2024, users have created more than 60m projects using its tools, the company said. In recent months, it has integrated payment functionalities and other features into its tools to help users monetise building using Lovable.

“As millions of people build with Lovable, the system gets better at understanding which choices lead to stronger outcomes,” it said.

The AI start-up said it will grow its global team – spread across Stockholm, London, Boston, San Francisco and New York – to roughly 450 people. Hiring will be focused around machine learning, product, infrastructure, and security roles.

EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund – the largest of its kind in Europe – is helping EU-based companies across a range of strategic sectors, including AI, quantum, clean energy, space-tech, biotech and medical innovation tap high growth capital and support in a bid to better compete with US and China in emerging technologies.

Finnish space intelligence start-up Iceye was the first to officially tap support from the Fund earlier this month, with reports also placing it behind the Bavarian space-tech The Exploration Company and Paris-based Mistral AI.

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The multi-year partnership will explore how hybrid quantum-AI infrastructure could address some of the globe’s most pressing challenges.

Quantum computing company Quantinuum and Technology platform Oracle have announced a multi-year partnership that aims to blend quantum computing and cloud infrastructure. 

Under the partnership, Quantinuum and Oracle plan to support enterprise, the AI lab, academic and research applications spanning drug discovery, materials science, financial modelling and large-scale optimisation. 

Quantinuum’s advanced quantum computer Helios will be deployed in a US-based OCI AI data centre to enable hybrid quantum-AI workloads as an OCI service. Oracle consumers will have access enabling them to combine quantum computing with ​Oracle’s graphics-processing and high-performance computing services.

“We believe the next phase of enterprise computing will be shaped by bringing quantum, AI and high-performance computing together,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, the president and CEO of Quantinuum. 

Hazra added, “Deploying Helios inside OCI gives Quantinuum and Oracle an opportunity to create a unique deeply integrated environment for hybrid workloads, explore enterprise use cases with customers, and accelerate commercial adoption.”

The partnership intends to explore how hybrid quantum-AI infrastructure might impact some of the most computationally intensive challenges facing enterprises, while also broadening access for universities and research institutions looking to advance scientific discovery and education. 

According to Quantinuum, the deal is a shared vision that the future of enterprise-based computing will be developed at the intersection of AI, classical supercomputing and quantum computing. 

Commenting on the announcement, Mahesh Thiagarajan, the executive vice-president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure said, “AI has changed what organisations can imagine and we believe quantum computing can expand what they’re able to solve.

“By bringing Quantinuum’s Helios to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we want to give developers a practical and secure way to explore how quantum computing could complement their existing AI and HPC workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure while improving compute efficiency and energy use.”

In late July, Zuriq, a quantum computing company based out of Switzerland, announced a seed funding round of $25.5m. The round, which was led by Quantonation, with participation from Forward.one, Extantia, Firgun Ventures and additional previous round investors, also raised a $4.2m pre-seed round in 2025.

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The partnership will work to train researchers across quantum error correction, filling a gap in the current workforce

Quantum computing company Alice & Bob has today (12 August) announced a partnership with QuBriC, Europe’s first Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network dedicated to quantum error correction.

QuBriC brings together 16 universities and seven quantum companies across Europe, including ETH Zürich, TU Delft, UCL, INRIA, Riverlane and IQM, to recruit and train 15 doctoral researchers. 

Backed by €4.6m in funding, to be delivered over four years through Horizon Europe’s MSCA programme, the network aims to develop researchers capable of tackling one of quantum computing’s biggest technical challenges, quantum error correction.

For 30 years, the MSCA programme has advanced research and innovation, supporting more than 150,000 researchers, 23 of whom are Nobel Prize winners. 

As an industry partner Alice & Bob will further develop the network’s research and training endeavours, while QuBriC will provide access to a pipeline of highly specialised talent and an academic network closely aligned on fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Commenting on the announcement, Christophe Vuillot, a principal research scientist at Alice & Bob, said, “QuBriC brings together leading universities, research institutes and quantum companies to train researchers and bridge these gaps, combining expertise from quantum information, coding theory and hardware engineering. 

“This next generation of researchers will be essential to accelerating the path to useful, fault-tolerant quantum computers.”

Globally there has been a significant push to invest in quantum capabilities and technologies. Recently, quantum computing company Quantinuum and Technology platform Oracle announced a multi-year partnership that aims to blend quantum computing and cloud infrastructure. 

In July, Zuriq, a quantum computing company based out of Switzerland, announced a seed funding round of $25.5m and Multiverse Computing, based in San Sebastián, Spain, announced a $570m Series C funding round. 

Also in July, the Irish Government published the Quantum 2030 Implementation Plan, which explores how the country intends to deliver on the targets and ambitions set out in the Quantum 2030 Strategy. 

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My old 21-inch gas mower was a Toro that a friend of mine found for free at the side of the road. He gave it to me, I replaced the carburetor, and it fired right up. Score! It ran fine for over a year. And mowing 5 acres with a small gas mower at an hourly rate made my son a relatively wealthy 11-year-old. But then it died again. And again. And at some point, small engine repair isn’t fun anymore.

While I was spending weekends cleaning carbs, tracking down air filters, and not mowing, the grass was growing. In northern Wisconsin, grass grows so fast I’m pretty sure you can see it happening if you take the time. A wet June ensured that by the time the Ego arrived for testing, the grass was well out of control, up to 10 inches in the lower, wetter areas of the property.

I figured it would make a good torture test for the Ego, but I’d still need to go in afterward to hack it back with my string trimmer. To my surprise, the Ego 1300 plowed right through almost all of it in a single pass.

For the first pass, I set the height to 4.5 inches, which is easy to do using the height adjustment lever. Unlike an alarming number of mower makers, Ego’s height adjustment system is a thing of beauty. The height markings aren’t arbitrary letters or symbols that require you to consult a manual to translate to inches. On the Ego, the height adjustment is plainly printed in inches. Imagine that. This lets you know that if you set it to 4.5 inches, your grass will be 4.5 inches high when you’re done.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Starting at 4.5 inches and running in Turbo mode allowed the Ego, in a single pass, to cut just about anything I pointed it toward. There is one patch of grass, below an active seeping spring, that was long enough and wet enough that I had to make two passes to get a nice even cut. After that initial mow, I then went back over it a few days later at 3 inches to finally get the height back to what I could call normal. The second mow was, dare I say, incredibly easy. Even the lowest self-propelled speed was generally fast enough for me, though I did crank it up to about the middle to get up the steeper slopes (and then turned it off entirely going downhill).

Apple is being forced to detail fees it wants to charge for outbound links in its continuing legal fight with Epic, and now it’s only got 24 hours to file them.

The ever-ongoing legal battle between Apple and Epic Games over what Apple should charge apps within the App Store has hit a snag for the iPhone maker. In the current phase, the two are fighting in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California over new fee proposal.

According to X posts by Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney on Tuesday, Apple attempted to delay a filing of proposed fees to the court. To Sweeney’s glee, that stay was denied.

As a consequence, Apple’s legal team now has just 24 hours to file the proposal with the court. After that Epic will have 60 days to analyze the proposal and make its own filing with the court.

Sweeney continued with a second post to X about the legal activity, asking if Apple will “honestly document their costs for human reviewer time and seek to recoup them?” Alternately, he proposes Apple may “fabricate outlandish new notions of cost previously unknown to mankind.”

As it stands, Epic and commentators have another 24-hour wait before finding that out.

How Apple got here

Apple and Epic have been in a lengthy battle that started with “Fortnite” letting players make in-app purchases using a third-party payment processor, against App Store rules. Epic also made demands that included allowing alternate app storefronts in iOS, and a change in the commission structure.

Apple did come out of the lawsuit pretty well, succeeding in many areas but failing to fend off changes to anti-steering measures, namely preventing developers from sending users to other processors to pay. Apple was ordered to make changes.

Epic convinced a court in April 2025 that Apple didn’t follow the spirit of the law, which led to more legal activity.

The latest action is midway through a schedule to discuss changes in App Store fees for outbound links, which goes back to May 2026.

Apple was given 45 days to file a “proffer,” or a good-faith offer of evidence and testimony to the court, with a 10-day timer to hand Epic non-privileged documents about the decision-making process after that. Five days later, Apple was to meet with Epic to discuss the privilege log and decide what documents warrant further review by a third party.

Today’s stay denial is at this point in the process.

Afterwards, Epic has 60 days to file its own response to the court, in a 30-page document. Apple would then have another 30 days to file a reply.

A Fortnite foible

While Sweeney’s tweets are chiefly about the lawsuit, there was an odd element about “Fortnite” and the Mac. In response to a question about what the decision means for the game on macOS, Sweeney said “We are rapidly approaching an endgame that will determine that one way or another.”

Currently, “Fortnite” is unavailable on macOS, but it seems to be less about being blocked and more Epic refusing to use the platform for its premier game.

At the time of the initial legal fight, Epic’s developer accounts were frozen out by Apple. However, in March 2024, Epic confirmed that Apple would reinstate its account in the EU.

Though celebratory in tone for the prospect of getting the game out on iOS, Epic didn’t discuss macOS at all.

As it stands, there doesn’t seem to be anything standing in Epic’s way from releasing “Fortnite” on macOS at all.

It has its own Epic Games Store on macOS, which can be used to make purchases completely outside of Apple’s App Store system. Also, developers can send Mac apps for notarization and still be distributed outside of the App Store itself, which Epic surely could handle with its reinstated developer account.

Parents who are stressed out are more likely to rely on screens and devices to keep their kids busy or calm — and less likely to enforce screen time limits. That’s the takeaway from a new screen time study from Florida International University’s Center for Children and Families. Researchers said the effects were more than a child acting out. 

Screen time is one way to keep kids busy, especially when school’s out. The time spent on tablets and laptops can be a break for parents to complete tasks or take a break. But readjusting to early mornings, class time and homework can be a big shift for both parents and kids when school is back in session. 

Jeff Temple, a professor and psychologist with UTHealth Houston, who was not affiliated with the FIU study, agrees. “For many families, screens become one of many tools that help everyone get through the day – and that’s mostly OK,” he told CNET. “The challenge comes when the structure of summer doesn’t transition back to the structure of the school year.” 

Screen time isn’t a parenting failure, but experts have concerns and recommendations to help families strike a healthy balance for the back-to-school season. 

Screen time is determined by parents’ stress

FIU’s study evaluated 822 caregivers of children ages 4 to 8 through online surveys on the child’s behaviors, parenting stress and screen time strategies. The findings show that parents opt for more screen time when a child’s behavior seems difficult and how much time is usually less enforced. 

Shayl Griffith, an assistant professor in FIU’s Department of Counseling, Recreation and School Psychology and senior author of the study, said in a news release that parents shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help. The study’s recommendation is to focus on screen time and media that are “meaningful, engaging and appropriate for their child’s age.” 

“When caregivers have the resources they need, they are better able to set consistent boundaries and engage with their children in ways that promote healthy development,” Griffith said.

The fine line between digital media discipline and disruption

Youth screen time is a growing concern. In January, the American Academy of Pediatrics published findings on correlations between digital media use and age-related development to help determine screen time rules for your child and monitor behavior.  

Toddlers and kindergarteners who use digital media for high-quality educational content can benefit from good social behaviors and language — especially when a caregiver is viewing the screen and interacting with the child. However, young children who use tablets for hours, but the AAP says too much screen time is linked to angry outbursts.

School-aged children, ages 6 to 12, can benefit from thoughtful educational digital media in moderation, the AAP study found. But again, there are risks. Too much media use can lead to lower academic achievement, attention control and cognition. Some media can be problematic for kids, like apps encouraging purchases, those focused on gaming with not much educational value and content that is dangerous or risky. And there’s a big callout included in the list: school devices that give access to “distracting video games, videos and other platforms.”

Managing stress, school and screen time is tricky

With summer wrapping up and school approaching, the big question is: How should stressed parents think about screen time? School may be the solution. 

“School can help provide a reprieve for families who do not have access to childcare in the summertime months and serve as a helpful jumping-off point to re-evaluate digital media habits, given the change in routine already,” said Dr. Tiffany Munzer, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. It can also mean more time for in-person interactions, which is important for social connection, Munzer added. 

However, making the switch from summer to back-to-school season can be challenging. And adjusting screen time while managing life stresses may not be easy. Munzer recommends making incremental changes. For example, if your child loves watching do-it-yourself videos, find a way to recreate what they’re seeing, Munzer said. Or if digital media is a way to calm kids, look for alternative activities such as reading or walking, Munzer added.

Jason Nagata, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, said the back-to-school season is a good time to revisit family screen time rules and routines. 

“Rather than simply trying to return to an old set of rules, families can consider what makes sense for the child’s current age, developmental stage, school schedule and use of devices for schoolwork and communication,” said Nagata. “A family media plan should be dynamic; it may reasonably look different during the school year than during summer or holidays, and on weekdays compared with weekends.”

The AAP recommends creating a Family Media Plan based on your family’s needs. The plan is an agreement that lets you prioritize healthy, safe and consistent screen time boundaries. That includes creating a list of approved media kids can choose from, a schedule of screen-free time, how to choose good media content and outlets for your family. 

Experts also recommend the AAP’s 5 C’s of Media Use, tailored to your child’s age. The five C’s are Child, Content, Calm, Crowing Out and Communication. They can help you set and communicate screen time guidelines based on your child, their emotions, the content and how it affects them. That may not help the stress that parents face, but it could help regulate your child’s screen time without guilt.

Nagata encourages parents to pay attention to their children’s time and relationship with screen time. Look out for warning signs like difficulty cutting back on screen time despite trying, becoming preoccupied with social media or a phone, experiencing conflict because of screen use and using screens to escape problems. And pay attention to see if screen use is interfering with sleep, school relationships or other activities so you can make more adjustments sooner. 

Dashia is the consumer insights editor for CNET. She specializes in data-driven analysis and news at the intersection of tech, personal finance and consumer sentiment. Dashia investigates economic shifts and everyday challenges to help readers make well-informed decisions, and she covers a range of topics, including technology, security, energy and money. Dashia graduated from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She loves baking, teaching spinning and spending time with her family.

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