AI Code Testing Startup Blacksmith Raises $66 Million at $1 Billion Valuation
Sequoia Capital leads Series C as the San Francisco company’s valuation nearly doubles in about two months
Blacksmith, an AI code testing startup based in San Francisco, has raised $66 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital. The round values the company at $1 billion, and Premji Invest, Peak XV Partners, Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator also took part. The latest valuation is nearly double the $550 million set in its previous round, which was announced in August.
Funding and Investors
The Series C takes Blacksmith’s total funding to $125 million. The earlier $45 million Series B was led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation, with GV and Y Combinator participating. A year ago, the company was valued at $60 million after a $10 million Series A. The jump in valuation over the past year is steep, even by the standards of fast-growing AI infrastructure startups.
Some reports put total funding at about $124.5 million rather than $125 million, a small difference in how the figures are rounded.
About Blacksmith
Blacksmith was founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru. The company provides infrastructure for building and testing code, and its platform runs continuous integration (CI) workflows that let developers build and test software before code is merged.
Blacksmith buys and installs its own servers to run CI workloads, and it competes with GitHub’s hosted CI machines and with coding tools that can run tests. The company says its platform runs CI jobs twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average. These performance figures come from the company itself.
Why the Demand Is Rising
The business has grown in step with AI-assisted coding. Blacksmith’s annual recurring revenue grew 17-fold this year, and the weekly number of CI jobs on its platform rose from 5 million in January to more than 90 million.
The reason is simple: AI coding agents generate far more code, and every change still has to be built, tested and checked before it ships. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company was founded to make CI “less painful,” and that many companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they now need to run. In his view, the central question for software written by AI agents is whether it can be trusted.
What the Money Will Be Used For
Blacksmith said the new capital will be used to expand its team and computing infrastructure. The company plans to grow its engineering team and increase its compute capacity fivefold in 2027.
Why It Matters
Blacksmith’s rise reflects a wider shift in the software industry. As AI tools speed up code writing, the bottleneck is moving to testing and validation, and investors are betting that infrastructure for that stage will be in heavy demand.
All growth figures are reported by the company and have not been independently audited.
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