Blacksmith hits unicorn valuation after Sequoia leads Series C
TechCrunch Dominic-Madori Davis ● Covered by 2 sources
Blacksmith raised $66M led by Sequoia and is now worth $1B. It’s riding the AI-code wave, and companies clearly need more software checks.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis — read the original for the full story.
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Blacksmith just landed a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia, pushing the software-testing platform to a $1 billion valuation. The company helps teams build and test code more efficiently, including code written by AI.
That focus matters because Blacksmith is selling relief from a very specific headache: continuous integration. CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company was built to make CI, the process of building, testing, merging and validating code changes, “less painful.” In his view, many companies are struggling to keep up with the amount of CI they need to run, and that pressure gets sharper as AI writes more code.
Blacksmith says its annual recurring revenue has grown 17x, and it has run more than 90 million CI jobs. Those are the automated checks that keep code from breaking later, which is a boring job until it isn’t. Then it’s everything.
The customer list is already real enough: Mercury and Granola are both named users. And the financing pace is brisk. This round came just two months after a $45 million Series B that valued Blacksmith at $550 million. A year ago, after a $10 million Series A, the company was valued at $60 million. It has now raised $125 million in total.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of startup that benefits from a simple truth: as AI writes more code, someone still has to make sure the mess doesn’t ship. Sequoia clearly likes the pick-and-shovel trade, and fair enough — the gold rush is noisy, but the testing bill always arrives. The bigger tell is that infrastructure for checking AI output is now getting unicorn money, which says a lot about who’s really making money off the frenzy.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
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