San Francisco-based AI startup Blacksmith, focused on automated software code testing, has raised $66 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital. This brings its total funding to $125 million and values the company at $1 billion, nearly doubling its worth since August.
- Raised $66M in Series C led by Sequoia; valuation hits $1B
- Platform handles over 90 million weekly CI jobs, up 18X since January
- Plans to expand compute capacity fivefold by 2027
What happened
Blacksmith, an AI-driven code testing startup founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, announced a $66 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors including Peak XV Partners, Premji Invest, Google Ventures, and Y Combinator also participated, lifting its total investment to $125 million.
The funding round values Blacksmith at $1 billion, nearly doubling its valuation from $550 million in August after a Series B round. The startup operates a cloud platform specialized for continuous integration (CI) workloads, currently supporting over 10,000 enterprise customers globally including tech firms like Mercury, Granola, Supabase, and LangChain.
Why it matters
As AI accelerates the pace at which code is generated, the traditional bottleneck in shipping software has shifted toward validating and testing code before deployment. Blacksmith’s tailored platform manages the high variability and large spikes in CI demand efficiently, claiming zero operational overhead compared to general-purpose cloud infrastructure.
The company reported a dramatic increase in usage, processing more than 90 million weekly CI jobs in October 2026, up from 5 million in January. This surge drove a 17-fold increase in annual recurring revenue during the same period, underscoring the critical role of scalable testing infrastructure in modern software development.
What to watch next
Blacksmith plans to invest heavily in expanding its compute infrastructure and engineering teams to support a projected fivefold growth in capacity in 2027. Currently managing nearly 10 MW of compute across data centers in the US and Europe, the company’s expansion efforts aim to keep pace with growing enterprise demand for AI-augmented software delivery.
The startup’s ability to scale and innovate in the continuous integration space will be key as more developers adopt AI code generation tools. Watching how Blacksmith balances rapid growth while maintaining efficiency and reliability will offer insights into future trends in AI-driven software development platforms.