AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year
TechCrunch Jagmeet Singh ● Covered by 2 sources
Blacksmith raised $45 million and its value jumped to $550 million. AI coding is speeding up software, but testing that code is still the choke point.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Jagmeet Singh — read the original for the full story.
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Blacksmith just pulled in a $45 million Series B, and the price tag on the company moved fast with it. Peak XV Partners led the round, and the new valuation lands at $550 million, up from $60 million in the Series A it closed less than a year ago.
That kind of jump would be eye-catching in any market. In this one, it says something specific: AI has made it much easier to produce code, but far harder to trust it. Blacksmith is betting that the real bottleneck is no longer writing software. It’s checking it before it breaks production.
Founded in 2024, the startup began as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads, helping companies run builds and tests. It has since added Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks. The company says it now has more than 5,000 customers, up from more than 700 less than a year ago, and that names like Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify are on the list.
The growth numbers are moving just as quickly. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said Blacksmith hit a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with 10 employees, and that the team has grown to about 30. Revenue is now in the “tens of millions of dollars,” he said, while some of the largest customers spend more than $1 million a year on the platform.
But the market is crowded, and Blacksmith knows it. GitHub Actions, the coding and validation features inside Codex and Claude Code, a pile of startups, and cloud rivals from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are all in the mix. Blacksmith is trying to win on speed and price, and it’s now aiming to move beyond testing into a broader set of tools for writing, validating, and merging code faster.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic AI-era plumbing: the gold rush is in the shovel sellers, not the prospectors. A startup that helps code pass muster is probably closer to the money than another app that just spits out more code and hopes for the best. The amusing part is that every model maker now wants a piece of the fixing, merging, and checking too, because nobody trusts the pile they helped create.
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