Blacksmith Secures $10 Million Series A Led by Google Ventures to Accelerate CI for AI Development

Blacksmith, a continuous integration (CI) platform, has successfully raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Google Ventures (GV). This significant investment, announced just four months after its seed round, aims to bolster Blacksmith's mission to provide faster, more cost-effective CI solutions, particularly for the rapidly evolving AI-driven development landscape. The funding round saw participation from Y Combinator and notable angel investors.

"Congrats to @useblacksmith on their $10M Series A! More than 12,000 devs across 800+ companies rely on Blacksmith for their CI," Y Combinator stated in a congratulatory tweet. The company's infrastructure has already processed over 1 billion vCPU-minutes, an equivalent of 2000 years of continuous compute time, showcasing its robust capabilities.

The Series A round was led by Google Ventures, which also participated in Blacksmith's $3.5 million seed round in May. Other investors included Y Combinator, Spencer Kimball (CEO of Cockroach Labs), and David Cramer (co-founder of Sentry). This rapid follow-on investment underscores investor confidence in Blacksmith's technology and its potential to address bottlenecks in modern software development.

Blacksmith's platform offers a high-performance CI cloud designed to complement GitHub Actions, targeting enterprises with 500 or more engineers. The company claims its solution can double CI speed and reduce compute costs by up to 75%, a critical advantage as AI coding agents increase the volume of code changes. This efficiency is achieved by running CI on high-performance hardware and optimizing for specific CI workloads.

Founded in January 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith has quickly scaled to serve over 700 customers, achieving $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from just $1 million in February. The founders, who previously built large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs, identified the growing pain points in CI as development workflows become more complex and demanding.

The newly secured capital will be utilized to expand Blacksmith's engineering and go-to-market teams, with plans to open offices in San Francisco and New York City. The company also intends to further develop its observability stack for GitHub Actions, providing deeper insights into CI/CD processes and helping developers streamline their code integration and deployment pipelines.