Once Speed became the decisive currency in the AI-driven software world, Blackmith raised another round (just four months after the seed) led by Google Ventures to accelerate how the code was shipped.
The $10 million Series A was shut down in just 14 days, and Google Ventures doubled after backing the first Blacksmith $3.5 million seed in May. At the time, Alphabet’s VC ARM betted on the size of the market and its founding team. However, in this round, GV was dependent on the outcome.
Blacksmith, which offers continuous integration and continuous delivery services for developers that complement GitHub’s action, has attracted hundreds of customers since May, and the boom in AI coding agents was described as opening the entire market, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash (pictured at left) in an exclusive interview.
The San Francisco-based startup recorded a $1 million hit in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in February. Jayaprakash, co-founders Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, and product designers. Since then, revenue has reached a $3.5 million ARR with over 700 customers, supported by a team of eight, and the company aims to double that number by the end of the year, Jayaprakash told TechCrunch.
Founded in January 2024, the blacksmith was born from the experiences of the founders who met at Waterloo University before building a large-scale distributed system at Faire and Cockroach Labs. So they saw firsthand how expensive and unpredictable the build and unit testing phase of a software release known as continuous integration (CI).
Jayaprakash said before shipping new code, hundreds of machines need to be spin-up and burn hundreds of hours of computing power to test new code.
A typical software development process involves a developer continuously pushing new code to a repository such as GitHub or AWS CodeCommit. To manage testing and integration of that code, cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure all offer their own solutions, but these are often slower, more expensive, or less predictable than your team needs.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
Unlike many rivals who rent popular cloud servers from cloud providers such as AWS, Blacksmith’s services run on high-performance game-grade CPUs. The result is that, according to the startup, it doubles the processing speed and reduces costs by 75%. Additionally, teams can switch by changing only one line of code, allowing them to start shipping faster than in minutes.
“We are heading down the bare metallic route, so we have better control over economics compared to hyperschool,” Jayaprakash told TechCrunch. “I’m not saying that all companies should go to bare metal, but if you’re a computing company, if you’re an infrastructure company where your bread and butter is calculated like us, it makes a lot of sense and it has plenty of control over our margins.”
By using hardware at facilities, startups improve margins as they expand their customer base, the founder said.
Blacksmith also offers a roadmap for test analysis and observability, providing deep insights to customers about Github actions. Github’s CI/CD platform automates how developers test and deploy software.
The Blacksmith targets companies with a team of over 500 engineers. Customers who are already performing GitHub actions through the platform include Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, DevSisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase and Veed.
The latest funding round also saw participation from existing investors and Angels, including Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball and Sentry co-founder David Cramer. Blacksmith was released from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and today there are 11 teams.
