Blacksmith has raised $10 million in fresh funding to make continuous integration less of a bottleneck for software teams racing to ship AI-era code.
The Series A was led by Google Ventures, and the company says the round closed in two weeks.
Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions on its own high-performance fleet rather than rented, generic cloud servers, a design it says delivers predictable performance with no queuing and a notable reduction in costs.
Teams point their existing GitHub workflows at Blacksmith and see builds run roughly twice as fast, while compute costs drop by up to 75%, according to the company that combination matters for developers who now push and test code constantly as they incorporate AI assistants and agents into their tooling.
Blacksmith frames slow CI as more than an annoyance, calling it a growth limiter for projects that iterate multiple times a day.
CEO Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash said in a press release, Most of the time, CI just gets in the way. The company argues its bare-metal approach lets it tune for maximum throughput and avoid the unpredictability that can come from sharing capacity on hyperscale clouds.
Blacksmith is adding test analytics and broader observability to surface flaky tests, bottlenecks, and cost hotspots in a single searchable view.
The company says this replaces brittle in-house scripts and trims the need for separate monitoring suites during build and test.
Blacksmith says more than 800 companies now run their GitHub Actions through its platform, including Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED.
Revenue has climbed from $1 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year and, by the company’s account, has roughly tripled in the past four months.
Angels named in the round include Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry.
Co-founders Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru met at the University of Waterloo and later built distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs.
Blacksmith launched from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, raised a seed round in May, and is now planning to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams while opening offices in San Francisco and New York.
Spending on developer productivity tools has become a defensive budget line as companies chase shorter release cycles and higher test coverage without ballooning cloud bills.
If Blacksmith’s claims hold up at scale, running GitHub Actions on tightly controlled hardware could present a margin advantage that compounds with usage.
The company’s move into observability is a logical wedge into adjacent spend, and it gives Blacksmith a way to differentiate beyond raw performance.
The question now shifts to go-to-market execution, converting early adoption into larger enterprise contracts, proving reliability during peak demand, and maintaining price-performance lead as incumbents and cloud providers respond.
