Antithesis, a Northern Virginia startup billing itself as infrastructure for seamless software, raised a $105 million Series A round led by Jane Street, a bet that stress testing of distributed systems is as important to blockchains as it is to high-speed trading.
The company’s platform uses deterministic simulation testing, running production-style simulations at scale to surface the types of edge cases that can explode in live networks, Antithesis said in a press release Wednesday.
When a failure occurs, Antithesis said it can replay the bug exactly, helping engineers isolate problems without the usual limbo being able to be reproduced, a familiar problem for crypto protocols where small glitches can spiral into chain instability.
Other investors participating in the funding round include Amplify Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Tamarack Global, First In Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures and Hyperion Capital, alongside the likes of Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh Patel and Sholto Douglas, the company said.
Antithesis relied on the credibility of cryptography, claiming that the Ethereum network used its simulations before The Merge to model extreme conditions and detect vulnerabilities before the proof-of-stake transition.
The company also cited customers in finance, AI, blockchain and data infrastructure, and said its revenue had grown more than 12 times over the past two years.
Antithesis said it would use profits to expand engineering, increase automation, expand marketing globally and push distribution through channels including AWS Marketplace.
AI agents are now sufficiently capable of identifying exploitable weaknesses in smart contracts and could already be used by attackers to exploit these flaws, according to a new study from Anthropic’s Fellows program.
Researchers said that as AI models become cheaper and more capable, automated hacking could spread from decentralized finance (DeFi) exploits to a wider range of software and critical infrastructure bugs.
Learn more: Anthropogenic Research Shows AI Agents Getting Closer to True DeFi Attack Capability
