Blacksmith raises $10 million from Google Ventures to speed up software delivery

Speed is everything in today’s AI-driven software world — and Blacksmith is betting it can help developers ship code faster and cheaper. The San Francisco–based startup announced a $10 million Series A led by Google Ventures (GV), just four months after raising its $3.5 million seed round.

Rapid Growth Since Seed

The latest round, which closed in just 14 days, reflects Blacksmith’s early momentum. Since its May seed round, the company has added more than 700 customers and scaled revenue from $1 million to $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

“We’ve seen hundreds of teams turn to Blacksmith as the AI coding boom drives demand for faster, more predictable infrastructure,” co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said in an interview.

Blacksmith’s founding team includes University of Waterloo alumni Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, who previously worked on large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. They experienced firsthand the pain points of continuous integration (CI) — the time- and cost-intensive stage of software development where new code is tested before release.

The Blacksmith Advantage

Blacksmith offers a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform that complements GitHub Actions, one of the most widely used CI/CD services. Unlike many rivals that rely on generic cloud servers from AWS or Azure, Blacksmith runs its service on bare-metal, gaming-grade CPUs.

That choice allows the company to:

• Double processing speeds compared to traditional providers.
• Reduce compute costs by up to 75%.
• Give engineering teams switch-on simplicity — migrating requires only a single line of code change.

“Because we’re going the bare-metal route, we have much better control over our economics compared to the hyperscalers,” Jayaprakash explained. “For compute-focused companies like ours, it makes a lot of sense and gives us abundant control over our margins.”

The startup also offers test analytics and observability features, giving teams deeper insights into GitHub Actions pipelines.

Who’s Using It

Blacksmith targets larger organizations with 500+ engineers. Its customers already include Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED.

Backers Double Down

Google Ventures, which also led Blacksmith’s seed round, doubled down for the Series A after seeing the company’s growth. Other backers include Spencer Kimball (CEO of Cockroach Labs) and David Cramer (co-founder of Sentry).

Blacksmith graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and has since grown its team to 11 employees. With the new funding, the company plans to expand headcount, scale infrastructure, and continue building features that make code delivery faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

The Bigger Picture

As AI agents increasingly write and push code autonomously, the speed of integration and testing is becoming a bottleneck in software development. Blacksmith’s pitch is simple: turn CI/CD into a competitive advantage instead of a cost center.

With GV’s backing and accelerating customer adoption, Blacksmith is positioning itself to become a critical layer in the software supply chain — one that promises to keep developers shipping at the pace the AI era demands.