In today’s AI-fueled software race, speed isn’t just nice to have — it’s survival. And San Francisco–based Blacksmith is doubling down on that reality. Just four months after its $3.5M seed round, the startup has closed a $10M Series A led (again) by Google Ventures. This time, GV wasn’t betting on potential — it was betting on results.
And results they got. Since May, Blacksmith has exploded from a scrappy four-person team to a growing force with 700+ customers and annual recurring revenue (ARR) that jumped from $1M in February to $3.5M today. For a startup founded in January 2024, that’s… fast. Like, AI-agent-fast.
So what’s Blacksmith actually solving? One of the most expensive and frustrating parts of building software: continuous integration (CI). If you’ve ever shipped code, you know the pain — hours (and dollars) burned spinning up machines just to test before release. Big cloud providers like AWS and Azure offer CI/CD tools, but they’re often too slow, too costly, or too unpredictable for teams moving at modern speed.
Blacksmith flips the model. Instead of renting generic cloud servers, they run their service on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs. The result? Code gets tested twice as fast while slashing compute costs by up to 75%. And dev teams don’t have to overhaul their workflow — swapping to Blacksmith is as easy as changing a single line of code.
Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash (ex-Faire and Cockroach Labs) says the “bare metal” approach is the secret sauce. Owning hardware gives Blacksmith total control over performance and margins, something hyperscalers can’t match. “If your bread and butter is compute, it makes sense to own the stack,” he told TechCrunch.
But Blacksmith isn’t stopping at raw speed. They’re also layering in test analytics and an observability roadmap to give teams deeper insights into GitHub Actions. Customers already onboard include Supabase, VEED, Ashby, Clerk, and Mintlify — names that move serious code at scale.
With the new funding, Blacksmith’s 11-person team is pushing to double ARR again by year’s end. And honestly? In a dev world where time is money, their pitch is simple: faster builds, cheaper compute, and fewer headaches.
Because in 2025’s AI-driven software economy, the fastest shipper really does win.
About the Author
