As speed becomes the defining currency in the AI-driven software world, blacksmith In another round led by Google Ventures (just four months after its seed), the way the code is shipped.
The $10 million Series A closed in just 14 days, with Google Ventures doubled after first supporting the Blacksmith’s $3.5 million seed in May. At the time, Alphabet’s VC arm bets on market size and founding teams, including the Cockroach Labs of another GV portfolio company. But in this round, GV is lingered by the results.
Blacksmith provides developers with continuous integration and continuous delivery services to complement GitHub Actions, attracting hundreds of customers since May, and the boom of AI coding agents exploded the wide open market, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash (above) said in an exclusive interview.
The San Francisco-based startup has only four people in February’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) – Jayaprakash, co-founders Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru and a product designer. Since then, revenue has reached $3.5 million in ARR, with more than 700 customers and supported by a group of eight, the company aims to double by the end of the year.
The Black Blacksmith was founded in January 2024, and the experience of its founders was born, they met at the University of Waterloo and then built a large-scale distributed system at Faire and the Cockroach Lab. There, they witnessed first-hand the expensive and unpredictable phases of the software distribution’s build and unit testing phases called continuous integration (CI).
You will have to spin hundreds of machines and burn hundreds of hours of computing power to test new code before shipping, Jayaprakash said.
A typical software development process involves developers constantly pushing new code to repositories such as GitHub or AWS CodeCommit. To manage the 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 service providers are often slower, more expensive or less predictable than what the team needs.
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Unlike many competitors who rent a universal cloud server from cloud providers like AWS, Blacksmith’s services run on high-performance, gaming-level CPUs. The startup said the results will double the speed and double the cost by up to 75%, calculating the cost. And, because the team can switch by changing a line of code, they can start shipping faster in minutes.
“Because we’ve gone on the metal pathway, we have better control over economics than super-rated players,” Jayaprakash told TechCrunch. “I’m not saying every company should use bare metal…but if you’re a computing company, if you’re an affiliate, your bread and butter are calculated, just like we do ourselves, which makes sense, which gives us a wealth of control over profit margins.”
The founders say the startup has increased profit margins as it grows its customer base by using hardware inside its home.
Blacksmith also provides test analysis and observability roadmap, providing customers with deeper insights into GitHub Action – GitHub’s CI/CD platform can automatically develop developers to test and deploy software.
The Blacksmith aims to be a company with a team of 500 engineers or more engineers. Customers who have operated GitHub 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 Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry. The Blacksmith started from Y Combinator’s 2024 winter batch and has 11 people today.
