Blacksmith’s valuation jumps 17x in 13 months as $66M Series C backs AI code testing
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu ● Covered by 3 sources
Blacksmith just raised $66M at a $1B valuation for its code-testing platform. AI agents are cranking out more code, and the checks are now the bottleneck.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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Blacksmith has landed $66 million in Series C funding and a $1 billion valuation, a jump that puts the young code-testing startup in unusual territory. Sequoia Capital led the round, while Premji Invest joined existing backers Peak XV Partners, GV, Alphabet’s venture arm, and Y Combinator. The company says the new money takes its total funding to $125 million.
The pitch is simple: software doesn’t ship until it’s built and tested, and AI coding agents have made that step far more crowded. Blacksmith runs those automated continuous integration jobs for other companies, handling the checks that happen every time a developer proposes a pull request. More than 10,000 companies now use the platform, and the startup says customers get CI jobs done twice as fast at 60% lower cost on average.
The growth numbers are doing a lot of work here. Blacksmith says weekly CI jobs on its platform climbed from 5 million in January to more than 90 million, while annual recurring revenue grew 17-fold. It has not disclosed the revenue figure itself. Customer counts have moved just as sharply, from about 800 companies when it announced Series A in September 2025 to more than 6,000 at Series B in August, and now above 10,000.
Founded in 2024 by University of Waterloo graduates Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith runs its customers’ CI jobs on servers it buys and operates itself rather than on general-purpose cloud machines. For GitHub Actions users, the company says switching can be a one-line change to a workflow file. It also says the proceeds will go toward hiring and more computing power, with just under 10 megawatts across data centres in the US and Europe today and a plan to grow that fivefold in 2027.
The timing is awkward in the best possible way. Anthropic said in September that its own CI jobs had risen 25-fold in six months, with Claude writing 80% of its code, which is exactly the sort of problem Blacksmith wants to sell relief from. But the market is crowded, with GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code, and the big clouds all in the mix. Blacksmith is betting that faster and cheaper will be enough to keep the middle of the stack alive.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what AI hype looks like when it runs into physics: somebody still has to test the code. Blacksmith’s real product isn’t magic, it’s boring infrastructure with a very good sense of timing, which is usually where the money is. The hard part now is whether the platforms swallow this layer before it gets too comfortable.
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