Blacksmith, a high-performance CI cloud designed to compete with industry giants in an AI world, announced $3.5 million in seed funding led by GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, with participation from angel investors including Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs; Peter Mattis, CTO of Cockroach Labs; and Rich Aberman, Co-Founder of WePay by J.P. Morgan.
Value proposition: In an AI world where agents and code generation tools exponentially increase the amount of code that exists, the existing CI challenges will only worsen, and companies, from startups to enterprises, will have to get past old workarounds and adapt quickly.
What makes Blacksmith unique is that the platform is not just another AWS, GCP, or Azure wrapper (like GitHub); instead, it’s a hardware-software stack that makes numerous purpose-built optimizations for CI, trade-offs that hyperscaler platforms, which must support general workloads, cannot make.
Customers: Blacksmith already works with over 600 organizations, including Ashby, Veed, Finch, Pylon, and Plex. Their technology has been critical in allowing their customers to unlock tremendous growth.
KEY QUOTES:
“Existing CI platforms often act as a bottleneck rather than an accelerator. Blacksmith is tackling this head-on by rethinking CI from the ground up, delivering the performance necessary for companies to innovate rapidly, particularly as AI transforms development workflows.”
Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV
“Instead of watching companies slow down as they awkwardly try to force legacy CI technologies into an AI mold, our goal is to reinvent from first principles.”
Aayush Shah, Co-founder of Blacksmith
