Blacksmith has raised $66 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation as the infrastructure company scales its platform for building and testing software amid rapidly increasing code generation from AI coding agents. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV, and Y Combinator. The financing brings Blacksmith’s total funding to $125 million and will support team and infrastructure expansion.
Founded in 2024 by Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith provides purpose-built infrastructure for continuous integration, or CI, workloads. The platform runs builds and tests that developers must complete before they can merge code changes.
Blacksmith sees a growing infrastructure bottleneck as AI coding tools allow developers to generate and submit substantially more code. While AI has accelerated software creation, every change still has to be compiled, tested, and validated before deployment, placing additional pressure on CI systems.
The company said many businesses currently run CI workloads on general-purpose cloud infrastructure that was not designed for the highly variable computing requirements associated with software testing. A single customer’s demand can rapidly move from almost no compute usage to tens of thousands of CPUs.
Blacksmith has designed its infrastructure to handle those spikes automatically. Customers can migrate workflows with a one-line change to their configuration files, without provisioning, scaling, or maintaining the underlying CI infrastructure.
According to Blacksmith, developers using its platform complete CI jobs twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average. The number of CI jobs running through Blacksmith each week increased from 5 million in January to more than 90 million, while the company’s annual recurring revenue grew 17-fold over the same period.
More than 10,000 startups and enterprise customers now use Blacksmith, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake, and LangChain. The company currently operates nearly 10 MW of computing capacity across data centers in the U.S. and Europe.
Blacksmith expects to increase that compute footprint by at least five times during 2027 as customer demand rises.
The company was built around the thesis that validating code would become an increasingly significant constraint on software delivery as AI tools accelerated code generation. Jayaprakash previously worked as an engineer at Faire, while Shah and Maru were early engineers at Cockroach Labs. The three founders met while studying at the University of Waterloo.
Blacksmith’s growth comes as software companies increasingly deploy AI coding agents across engineering teams. The company pointed to Anthropic, which recently reported that its own CI volume increased 25-fold within six months as Claude took on a larger share of coding work.
The new financing will allow Blacksmith to expand infrastructure capacity and hiring as it positions CI as a critical layer in the software development stack for organizations producing growing volumes of AI-generated code.
KEY QUOTES:
“Since Claude Code took off in March, almost every conversation we’ve had with a large engineering team has started the same way. Developers who used to push three or four pull requests a day are now pushing orders of magnitude more and their CI infrastructure can’t keep up. We’re grateful to our customers who are trusting us to solve this bottleneck, and excited to partner with Sequoia to solve it at scale.”
Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Co-Founder And CEO Of Blacksmith
“JP and team understood early that as AI agents wrote more code, the infrastructure to build and test it would need to change. What stood out to us was their deep systems expertise and speed of execution. That has translated into a product that helps their customers test and ship their software faster. We believe that foundation gives Blacksmith room to build much more as the demands of software development change.”
Isaiah Boone, Partner At Sequoia Capital
“Blacksmith has significantly reduced the burden of managing our CI runners while cutting our runner costs by roughly 40%, and that doesn’t even account for the engineering time we’ve saved.”
Joaquin Borggio, Infrastructure Engineer At LangChain
