Blacksmith reaches $1 billion valuation on $66 million Sequoia-led Series C
In brief
- Blacksmith is valued at $1 billion after a $66 million Sequoia Capital-led Series C, Fortune reported.
- The Series C came about two months after a $45 million Series B at a $550 million valuation.
- Blacksmith's total funding now stands at about $124.5 million, according to Fortune.
- Blacksmith sells cloud runners and caching tools for CI jobs, pitched against GitHub Actions.
Three valuations, one short stretch
Fortune put Blacksmith's total funding at about $124.5 million after the Series C. Before this round, the company had raised roughly $58.5 million, per Crypto Briefing. The earlier Series B was led by Peak XV Partners, with GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Y Combinator also participating.
That's a steep curve.
Crypto Briefing reported that Blacksmith sat at roughly $60 million after its Series A, then jumped to $550 million with the Series B (and it's now at $1 billion, according to Fortune). All of it happened at a company founded in 2024.
What Blacksmith actually sells
Blacksmith sells high-performance cloud runners plus caching tools built for continuous integration (CI) workloads, the automated checks code runs through before it ships. The founders started with bare-metal CI runners for GitHub Actions, meaning dedicated physical servers rather than shared virtual machines.
CEO Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash founded the company in San Francisco alongside Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru. The trio came through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. Supabase and Expensify are among its named customers.
There's also an AI piece. Blacksmith's Codesmith coding agent, Crypto Briefing said, automatically diagnoses failed code checks and attempts to fix them.
The GitHub dependency
Blacksmith positions itself as a quicker, cheaper alternative to running CI jobs on GitHub Actions, according to Crypto Briefing. That pitch cuts both ways, per Crypto Briefing's analysis: the startup's fortunes are partly tied to how a much larger platform chooses to price and improve its own offering.
Frequently asked questions
What does Blacksmith do?
Blacksmith runs the infrastructure companies use to test their code before release. It sells high-performance cloud runners and caching tools for continuous integration (CI) workloads, and according to Crypto Briefing it positions itself as a quicker, cheaper alternative to running those jobs on GitHub Actions.
How has Blacksmith's valuation changed?
Crypto Briefing reported that Blacksmith was valued at roughly $60 million after its Series A and $550 million after its Series B. Fortune reported that a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital now values it at $1 billion, about two months after the Series B.
