AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year
A $10M Series A from Google Ventures values the CI infrastructure startup at $100 million, just months after its seed round.
Written by OutOfToken AI
August 12, 2026 · 4 min read · Synthesized from reporting by TechCrunch Startups · How this works
Blacksmith, a startup building faster infrastructure for continuous integration, has raised a $10 million Series A led by Google Ventures at a $100 million valuation. That figure marks nearly a tenfold jump from where the company stood less than a year ago, and it arrives just four months after its seed round closed.
The problem with CI at scale
Every time a developer pushes new code to a repository like GitHub or AWS CodeCommit, that code needs to be tested and integrated before it ships. Doing this typically means spinning up hundreds of virtual machines and burning through significant compute time, a process known as continuous integration, or CI.
Where the big clouds fall short
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure all offer their own CI tooling, but Blacksmith's founders argue these solutions are frequently too slow, too expensive, or too unpredictable for modern development teams. Rather than renting generic cloud servers the way many competitors do, Blacksmith has built its own approach to the workload, positioning itself as infrastructure purpose-built for CI rather than a repurposed slice of general-purpose cloud capacity.
"Blacksmith says it's now handling almost 10x the number of CI jobs compared to the start of the year — running CI for fast-growing companies including Ashby, Supabase, and VEED.IO."
Founders who've felt the pain firsthand
Blacksmith's founders, educated at the University of Waterloo, previously built large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. Co-founder Aditya Jayaprakash has described the old way of doing things bluntly: teams would have to spin up hundreds of machines and burn through hundreds of hours of computing power just to test new code before shipping it. That experience shaped Blacksmith's pitch — a compute fabric designed specifically to absorb the kind of bursty, unpredictable workload that CI pipelines generate.
Betting on an AI-driven surge in code
The company's growth story is tightly linked to the rise of AI code-generation tools. As coding assistants make it faster to write software, the volume of code being pushed into CI pipelines is climbing sharply, and Blacksmith's founders expect that trend to keep compounding. Alongside the funding, the company also announced a new Test Analytics product aimed at helping developers debug pipeline failures that are becoming more frequent as CI volume explodes.
Whether Blacksmith's growth curve holds as AI-generated code volumes rise remains to be seen, but investors are clearly betting that CI infrastructure is about to become a much bigger bottleneck — and a much bigger business. With Google Ventures doubling down so soon after its seed check, the startup now has both capital and validation to chase that thesis aggressively.
Editorial Note
The research strongly corroborates the core facts about funding amount, lead investor, current valuation, founders' backgrounds, and named customer clients. However, the article's headline claims about '10x revenue growth' and '10x valuation jump' are only partially supported—the research confirms '10x CI jobs' handled but does not independently verify revenue figures or the prior valuation baseline needed to prove the tenfold increase claim. The article reads as largely company-provided information without external corroboration of growth metrics.
Claim Tracker
AI-assessed
Confirmed by multiple sources: TechCrunch (Source 3), The Tech Buzz (Source 4), and LinkedIn posts from company founders (Sources 5 and 6).
The research confirms the current $100M valuation and prior seed round 4 months prior, but provides no data on the prior valuation figure needed to verify the '10x' claim.
The research mentions '10x the number of CI jobs' (Sources 5 and 6) but does not confirm revenue growth figures. Revenue and job volume are different metrics.
Confirmed by The Tech Buzz (Source 4) and corroborated by SiliconANGLE (Source 1).
Confirmed by LinkedIn posts from company co-founders (Sources 5 and 6) and SiliconANGLE (Source 1).
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