In an AI-driven software world where speed is the defining currency, Blacksmith has raised a new round of funding led by Google Ventures. This investment comes just four months after its seed round and is intended to accelerate how code gets shipped.
The $10 million Series A round closed in just 14 days. Google Ventures doubled down after first backing Blacksmith’s $3.5 million seed round in May. Initially, Alphabet’s VC arm bet on the size of the market and the founding team, which included veterans of Cockroach Labs. For this latest round, the investor was swayed by the company’s results.
Blacksmith offers a continuous integration and continuous delivery service for developers that complements GitHub Actions. Since May, the company has pulled in hundreds of customers. The co-founder and CEO, Aditya Jayaprakash, stated in an exclusive interview that the boom in AI coding agents has blown the market wide open.
The San Francisco-based startup hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue in February with a team of just four people. Since then, revenue has reached $3.5 million ARR with more than 700 customers. The company is now supported by a team of eight and is aiming to double that revenue figure by the end of the year.
Founded in January 2024, Blacksmith was born from the experiences of its founders. They met at the University of Waterloo before going on to build large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. In those roles, they saw firsthand how costly and unpredictable the build and unit testing stages of software releases, known as continuous integration, can be.
Developers often have to spin up hundreds of machines and burn through hundreds of hours of computing power just to test new code before shipping it. The typical software development process involves developers continuously pushing new code into repositories. To manage the testing and integration, cloud service providers offer their own solutions, but these are often slower, costlier, or less predictable than teams require.
Unlike many rivals that rent generic cloud servers from providers like AWS, Blacksmith’s service runs on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs. The startup claims this results in up to double the processing speed and can lower compute costs by as much as seventy-five percent. Because teams can switch by changing just a single line of code, they can start shipping faster within minutes.
The CEO explained that by taking a bare-metal route, the company has much better control over its economics compared to the hyperscalers. He noted that while not every company should go bare metal, it makes sense for a compute or infrastructure company where compute is their bread and butter. This approach gives them abundant control over their margins. By using hardware at its premises, the startup improves its margins as it grows its customer base.
Blacksmith also offers test analytics and an observability roadmap, giving customers deeper insights into GitHub Actions. The company targets companies with teams of 500 engineers or more. Its current customer base includes Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED.
The latest funding round also saw participation from existing investors and angels, including Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry. Blacksmith launched out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and today has a team of 11 people.