San Francisco-based Blacksmith, a software development tools provider, announced it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Google Ventures (GV). This investment, secured just four months after the company's seed round, aims to bolster its continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services designed to expedite software deployment. The financing round reportedly closed within 14 days.
Google Ventures' participation marks a continued commitment, having previously led Blacksmith's $3.5 million seed round in May. According to Blacksmith co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash, GV's decision to double down on its investment for the Series A was influenced by the company's recent operational results. Jayaprakash stated that the \"boom in AI coding agents has blown the market wide open\" for their services.
Since its seed funding in May, Blacksmith has expanded its customer base to over 700 clients. The startup, founded in January 2024, achieved $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in February with a team of four. As of the announcement, its ARR has reportedly reached $3.5 million, supported by a team of eight. Jayaprakash indicated the company's objective is to double that revenue figure by the end of the year.
Blacksmith provides CI/CD services that integrate with GitHub Actions, addressing what its founders identified as costly and unpredictable build and unit testing stages in software releases. Unlike some competing cloud service provider solutions, which the company claims can be slower or more expensive, Blacksmith's platform operates on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs. This infrastructure is cited by the company as enabling up to double the processing speed and reducing compute costs by as much as 75%. Jayaprakash noted that this \"bare-metal route\" provides \"much better control over our economics\" and \"abundant control over our margins.\"
The company's founders, Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, developed large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs before establishing Blacksmith. Blacksmith, which emerged from Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, currently has a team of 11. It targets organizations with engineering teams of 500 or more. Current customers 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.
