This week’s guests are Henry and Ani, co-founders of Smithery. Smithery is building the marketplace and runtime for MCP, making it easier for developers to distribute, discover, and monetize tools in the emerging agent ecosystem.

Smithery provides a platform to connect your repo, integrate with CI/CD, and handle hosting for servers seamlessly. MCP shines when agents become more general, but it only scales if demand grows for more connections between tools and systems. Drawing from their experiences at Browserbase, Whatnot, and prior AI startups, Ani and Henry saw the need for standardization across the agent stack and set out to build the distribution and trust layer for MCP.

We cover what early traction they’re seeing from developers, how they’re approaching payments and identity to reduce configuration friction, and what the broader shift toward open, composable AI infrastructure means for the future of agents.

Episode chapters:

1:51 — Getting into AI
5:30 — The Origin of Smithery
7:40 — Building the Supply Side
9:10 — Why Smithery Is the Easiest Way to Discover MCPs
13:30 — Agent Authentication and Identity
17:08 — The Most Popular MCPs
19:50 — MCP and the Principle of Separation of Concerns
22:50 — How AI Is Being Used Today
25:57 — Defining Success as Founders
31:45 — Quire Fire Round

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E63: Building the Agent Marketplace Layer with Henry and Ani (Smithery)