Antithesis, a Northern Virginia startup pitching itself as infrastructure for never-down software, raised a $105 million Series A led by Jane Street, a bet that stress testing distributed systems means as much to blockchains as it does to high-speed trading.
The company’s platform uses deterministic simulation testing and runs large-scale production-like simulations to show the kinds of edge cases that can be blown up in live networks, Antithesis said in a press release Wednesday.
When a bug hits, Antithesis said it can replay the bug exactly, helping engineers isolate problems without the usual can’t-reproduce limbo, a well-known pain point for crypto protocols where small errors can spill over into chain instability.
Other investors in the funding round include Amplify Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Tamarack Global, First In Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures and Hyperion Capital, along with the likes of Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh Patel and Sholto Douglas, the company said.
Leaning on crypto credibility, Antithesis says the Ethereum network used its simulations ahead of The Merge to model extreme conditions and catch vulnerabilities before the proof-of-stake transition.
The company also cited clients across finance, AI, blockchain and data infrastructure, and said revenue increased more than 12 times over the past two years.
Antithesis said it will use the proceeds to expand engineering, increase automation, scale go-to-market globally and push distribution through channels including AWS Marketplace.
AI agents are now able to identify exploitable weaknesses in smart contracts and can already be used by attackers to weaponize those flaws, according to new research from the Anthropics 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 failures.
Read more: Anthropic research shows that AI agents are approaching true DeFi attack capabilities
