# Smithery

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/smithery/ · added 2026-11-07 · updated 2026-11-07

**In short.** Smithery (Registry and hosting for MCP servers (tools for AI agents), United States): Acquired by Arcade.dev, August 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 2 co-founders; 4 people on the about page in May 2026 (2 co-founders, 2 founding engineers). Launched December 2024; sold 20 months after launch.

Registry and hosting for MCP servers (tools for AI agents) · United States · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · sold · group: Developer tools and coding agents

- Outcome: Acquired by Arcade.dev, August 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: December 2024; months from launch to the outcome: 20
- Team: 2 co-founders; 4 people on the about page in May 2026 (2 co-founders, 2 founding engineers)
- Outside funding: Not published; South Park Commons lists Smithery among its companies
- Main factor: Timing
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 2
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Exit, B2B, Developer tools

Links:

- Visit smithery.ai: https://smithery.ai/
- Archived smithery.ai, July 2026: https://web.archive.org/web/20260707053851/https://smithery.ai/

**The product.** A public website that listed MCP servers, small programs that give an AI assistant or agent tools such as web search or access to Slack, with a command-line installer, hosting of the servers on Smithery's machines and managed logins to the services behind them. Developers searched the list, connected a server to their assistant in one step, and paid for traffic above a free tier.

**Why it worked.** It was live by December 2024 with one command that installed a server into Claude Desktop, and in the buyer's words it was built on the idea that finding and running an MCP server should take one click. Arcade.dev, which sells security and governance for the tool calls of enterprise agents, bought it for that developer reach: its post says enterprises want both the developer speed of Smithery and the confidence to run those tools in production.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Smithery was a registry, a searchable public list, of MCP servers. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard by which an AI agent, a program in which a language model decides the next step and calls tools to take it, reaches outside services: an MCP server is a small program that offers tools such as "search my notes" or "send a Slack message". Smithery listed the servers, hosted many of them, and handled the logins to the services behind them.

The earliest archived copy of smithery.ai, from 12 December 2024, shows a registry with an install command for Claude Desktop. Henry Mao, its CEO, and Anirudh Kamath co-founded it, and in May 2026 its about page listed the two co-founders and two founding engineers. Its archived pricing page listed a Pro plan from US$300 a month in October 2025 and a Pay as you Go plan at US$10 a month in August 2026. On 5 August 2026 Arcade.dev announced that it had acquired Smithery, and neither company disclosed the price.

No revenue figure and no sale price exist in the sources, so this is a grade E story: the headline is the sale itself, stated by the buyer. After the sale Smithery refunded every charge since 5 August, and on 31 October 2026 it shut down its hosting, its API, its accounts and its command-line tool; smithery.ai stays as a public directory run by Arcade.

## Pricing

Smithery prices before the sale, from Internet Archive copies of its pricing page of 27 October 2025 and 4 August 2026 (grade C); the page no longer exists and the paid plans ended after the sale

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby (October 2025) |  | 0 | up to 10K RPCs a month; landing page, playground, deployment from GitHub, basic hosting |
| Pro (October 2025) |  | from 300 | from 1M RPCs a month, then US$100 per million; custom domain, featured listing |
| Custom (October 2025) |  | contact us | 99% uptime SLA, support SLA |
| Hobby (August 2026) |  | 0 | 50K RPCs; managed OAuth, persistent connections |
| Pay as you Go (August 2026) |  | 10 | 100K RPCs, 100 namespaces; then US$0.10 per 1K RPCs |
| Custom (August 2026) |  | contact us | custom rate limits, uptime SLA, Slack support |

An RPC (remote procedure call) here is one request from an agent to an MCP server, for example one tool call. The October 2025 page priced hosting for people who publish MCP servers. The August 2026 page priced connections for people who use them, with managed OAuth logins: the US$10 a month is a credit that RPCs use up, then US$0.10 per 1,000 RPCs. Neither page shows a yearly price. After the sale Smithery refunded every charge since 5 August 2026 and cancelled the subscriptions.

## How much did Smithery make, and what was it sold for? The numbers, graded

A registry for AI agent tools, started by two co-founders, live by December 2024 and bought by Arcade.dev 20 months later; no revenue figure or price was published

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Acquired by Arcade.dev, announced 5 August 2026 | A | The buyer's blog: "Arcade.dev has acquired Smithery". Co-founder Anirudh Kamath joins the Arcade team. Dealroom News repeated it on 11 August 2026. | [1, 2] |
| Sale price | not disclosed | C | Dealroom News, 11 August 2026: "neither company disclosed the price." Arcade's post gives no amount. | [2, 1] |
| Founders | Henry Mao (co-founder, CEO) and Anirudh Kamath (co-founder) | C | Smithery's about page in May 2026 and the AI Engineer directory. South Park Commons names Henry Mao as founder. Only Kamath is named as joining Arcade. | [6, 9, 10] |
| Team, May 2026 | 4 people: 2 co-founders and 2 founding engineers | C | The about page listed these four under "Meet the people behind Smithery" and said it was hiring. The December 2024 about page listed two maintainers. | [6, 8] |
| Earliest archived version | 12 December 2024: a registry of MCP servers with an installer | C | The home page showed the command "npx @smithery/cli install mcp-obsidian --client claude". The about page of 14 December 2024 called it "a registry of model context protocols". South Park Commons gives 2025 as the company's year. | [7, 8, 10] |
| Paid plan, October 2025 | Pro from US$300 a month | C | Archived pricing page: from 1 million RPCs a month, plus US$100 per million RPCs in overages, for people who publish MCP servers. | [4] |
| Paid plan, August 2026 | Pay as you Go, US$10 a month | C | Archived pricing page of 4 August 2026, the day before the sale was announced: "RPCs consume your $10 credits, then $0.10 / 1K". | [5] |
| Paying customers after the sale | every charge since 5 August 2026 refunded | C | Smithery's notice, signed by Kamath: "We're refunding every charge since August 5 and cancelling your subscription going forward." No count of paying customers is given. | [3] |
| Servers listed | more than 17,300 MCPs, August 2026 | C | The AI Engineer directory, which calls the number "a measure of catalog breadth", not of use. | [9] |
| Location and backers | San Francisco; listed among South Park Commons companies | C | South Park Commons company page. No funding amount or round is published in the sources. | [10] |
| The buyer's own funding | US$60 million Series A in June 2026, US$72 million in total | C | Dealroom News. This is Arcade's money, not Smithery's. | [2] |
| Time from the earliest archived version to the sale | 20 months | calc | Calculated: December 2024 to August 2026. | [7, 1] |

How to read this table: a grade A value is stated by the buyer, Arcade.dev, in its own announcement. A grade C value is a statement by Smithery on its own pages (live or in Internet Archive copies) or by a third-party directory or news site. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No money amount for the sale or for revenue exists in the sources.

## When did Smithery launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a list of MCP servers in December 2024 to a sale to an agent-security company in August 2026, in 20 months. Each entry carries its grade.

- **12 December 2024** (grade C [7, 8]): The earliest archived copy of smithery.ai: a list of MCP servers, each with a one-line command that installs it into Claude Desktop.
- **27 October 2025** (grade C [4]): The pricing page sells hosting to publishers of MCP servers: Hobby free, Pro from US$300 a month, Custom by contract.
- **May 2026** (grade C [6]): The about page lists four people, the two co-founders and two founding engineers, and asks builders to apply.
- **4 August 2026** (grade C [5]): The pricing page now sells managed connections: Hobby free, Pay as you Go at US$10 a month in credits, Custom.
- **5 August 2026** (grade A [1, 2]): Arcade.dev announces that it has acquired Smithery and that co-founder Anirudh Kamath joins its team. No price is given.
- **31 October 2026** (grade C [3, 11]): Smithery shuts down its proxy, server URLs, API, accounts, command-line tool and SDKs, after refunding charges since 5 August. smithery.ai stays as a directory powered by Arcade.

## Why did Smithery work?

### One step to find and run a tool

The registry, the installer and the hosting were one product: a developer found a server on the list, ran one command or clicked once, and the server ran on Smithery's machines. Arcade's post calls this the reason Smithery became the go-to place for developers building with MCP.

### Charge for traffic, not for the listing

Listing and light use were free. The October 2025 pricing page listed its paid plan by volume of RPCs, and the August 2026 page listed prepaid credits that RPCs use up. The price grew with the agents' use, not with the number of servers.

### A small team in front of a buyer that needed developers

Arcade sells authorization and audit for the tool calls of enterprise agents. Smithery had the developer audience and the catalog. The buyer kept the directory and the co-founder and shut down the hosting and the managed logins; the shutdown notice sends users who want ready-made Gmail or Slack tools to Arcade.

## How it was built

These details come from Smithery's own pages, live and archived, and from the AI Engineer directory. They are grade C. No source names an AI model inside Smithery.

- A command-line installer, @smithery/cli, run with npx: the December 2024 home page shows "npx @smithery/cli install mcp-obsidian --client claude".
- Hosting for MCP servers with automatic deployment from GitHub, a playground for testing, and observability, as the October 2025 pricing page listed them.
- Smithery Connect for managed logins: the AI Engineer directory says it handles OAuth flows, token refresh and connection lifecycles with agent.pw, Smithery's open-source credential vault, in encrypted, write-only storage.
- Server URLs on run.tools and server.smithery.ai, a Smithery API, Connect, Toolbox, the CLI and SDKs: the list of services that the October 2026 notice says stopped working.
- Analytics with PostHog, visible in the source code of the December 2024 pages.

Sources: [7, 4, 9, 3]

## Who tried this before Smithery, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups sold developers a layer between their apps and other services, and ended after a larger company bought them or lost interest. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Parse.com (2011 to 2017; funding US$85M; cause: Unit Economics)

- Promise: A backend as a service: mobile developers shipped apps without running their own servers or databases.
- Why it died: Facebook bought it, found no way to make money from developer tools, and shut it down.
- Record: 

### Singly (2011 to 2016; funding US$2.7M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One API to collect and sync a user's data from many social services.
- Why it died: It depended on other companies' APIs, Zapier and IFTTT offered broader automation, and its buyer Appcelerator moved its focus elsewhere.
- Record: 

### Twitter Fabric (2014 to 2020; funding US$100M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One kit for app developers, from crash reports to analytics.
- Why it died: Twitter's priorities changed, it sold Fabric to Google, and Google folded it into Firebase.
- Record: 

## What changed

Each of the three gave developers a shared layer that they did not want to build, and each ended when a larger owner changed its plan: Facebook closed Parse, Appcelerator's purchase moved the focus away from Singly's product, and Google folded Fabric into Firebase. Smithery's end has the same shape. The buyer kept the directory and the co-founder and closed the hosting and the logins within three months.

Two things differ. MCP is an open standard that many AI clients speak, so the registry did not rest on one company's API terms, as Singly did. And Smithery was small, four people on its about page in May 2026, while Parse and Fabric had raised US$85M and US$100M according to the database.

## Can one person copy Smithery now?

**Verdict: The registry, no. The pattern, yes.**

A first public list for a new protocol is a short window: Smithery's own pricing page in October 2025 already offered to sync servers to an official MCP registry. The pattern that remains open is to be early with the boring parts of a new standard, hosting and logins, and to be bought by a larger company that sells to enterprises.

1. When an open standard for AI tools appears, publish the first searchable list of what exists, with one-command install.
2. Host the parts that are hard for developers to run themselves, such as servers and OAuth logins, and charge by usage above a free tier.
3. Keep the team small, so that a sale to a larger company in the same layer is a good outcome.
4. Expect the buyer to keep only what it needs: Arcade kept the directory and closed the hosting.

**What is still open.** Hosting, testing and login handling for newer agent standards, such as skills and agent-to-agent protocols, where no official tool exists yet.

## What could go wrong for Smithery?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure, no count of paying customers and no sale price were found. We read the buyer's announcement, a Dealroom news item, Smithery's live and archived home, about and pricing pages, its shutdown notice, the AI Engineer directory and the South Park Commons page; none gives an amount. Funding is not published. The founding year differs: the registry is archived from December 2024, while South Park Commons gives 2025. The South Park Commons page for Smithery now carries the title Flamecast, and the archived pricing page of 4 August 2026 announced "Flame, an assistant that learns and improves"; no source says how these relate to the sale. A reader could look for a statement by Henry Mao or a filing by Arcade.
- **The buyer closed most of the product.** On 31 October 2026 the hosting, API, accounts, command-line tool and SDKs stopped, and paying users were refunded for every charge since 5 August 2026, Smithery's notice says. What remains is a directory with direct links to vendors' official MCP addresses.
- **Competition.** Smithery's October 2025 pricing page offered to sync servers to "the official MCP registry", so a free official list existed beside it. On this site, Metorial and Executor sell gateways between AI clients and the tools their agents call; both were still running in November 2026, while Smithery's own hosting closed after its sale.
- **Dependence on MCP and on the AI clients.** Smithery ran no language model of its own in any source we read. Its demand came from AI clients that speak MCP: the December 2024 home page installed servers into Claude Desktop, and the AI Engineer directory says connected accounts worked with agents that use Claude, GPT and open-source models. A change in how those clients find tools, or an official registry, takes away the reason to use a third-party list.

## Sources

1. Arcade.dev blog, 5 August 2026: Smithery Is Now Part of Arcade.dev, by Alex Salazar — https://www.arcade.dev/blog/smithery-joins-arcade/ (grade A). Read in full, 7 November 2026. The buyer's announcement. Source for the acquisition, Kamath joining Arcade and the buyer's reasons.
2. Dealroom News, 11 August 2026: Arcade acquires Smithery to control the agent tool supply chain — https://dealroom.co/news/144262-arcade-acquires-smithery-to-control-the-agent-tool-supply-chain/ (grade C). Read in full, from the copy that the pipeline downloaded on 7 November 2026. Source for the undisclosed price and Arcade's own funding.
3. Smithery: The future of Smithery (Smithery's MCP Proxy and managed identity shut down on October 31) — https://smithery.ai/future (grade C). Read in full, 7 November 2026. Signed by Anirudh Kamath. Source for the shutdown, the refunds and what remains.
4. Internet Archive copy of the Smithery pricing page, 27 October 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20251027173821/https://smithery.ai/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the Hobby, Pro and Custom plans for publishers.
5. Internet Archive copy of the Smithery pricing page, 4 August 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20260804172350/https://smithery.ai/pricing (grade C). The plans load by script; read from the plan text embedded in the archived page. Source for the Hobby, Pay as you Go and Custom plans.
6. Internet Archive copy of the Smithery about page, 4 May 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20260504040255/https://smithery.ai/about (grade C). Read in full. Source for the co-founders and the team of four. The live about page no longer exists.
7. Internet Archive copy of the Smithery home page, 12 December 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20241212123601/https://smithery.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. The earliest archived copy. Source for the first version and its install command.
8. Internet Archive copy of the Smithery about page, 14 December 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20241214164353/https://smithery.ai/about (grade C). Read in full. Source for the first description of the registry and its two maintainers.
9. AI Engineer, organization page: Smithery, AI agent integrations and MCP infrastructure — https://ai.engineer/orgs/smithery (grade C). Read in full, 7 November 2026. A third-party directory that lists its sources as checked on 28 August 2026. Source for the co-founders' roles, Smithery Connect and the count of listed servers.
10. South Park Commons, companies: Smithery (page title now Flamecast) — https://www.southparkcommons.com/companies/smithery (grade C). Read in full, 7 November 2026. Source for San Francisco, the year 2025 and Henry Mao as founder.
11. Smithery home page, read 7 November 2026 — https://smithery.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. Shows "Smithery is now part of Arcade" and the shutdown banner.
12. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Smithery? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Smithery).