Blacksmith: Funding Rounds, Investors & CEO

About Blacksmith

Blacksmith runs CI for teams that use GitHub Actions. CI is the set of builds and tests that check each code change before it is merged. Teams switch to Blacksmith by changing one line in a workflow file. Their jobs then run on Blacksmith's own bare-metal servers, which use gaming CPUs for fast single-core speed. It also offers CI log search, test analytics and codesmith, a coding agent that fixes failing builds.

More than 10,000 companies run CI on Blacksmith, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake, LangChain, Mercury and Supabase. It runs more than 90 million jobs a week on just under 10 MW of computing power in data centers in the U.S. and Europe. CEO Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash founded the company in 2024 with Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru. It has about 40 employees in New York and San Francisco, according to Fortune.

Funding Rounds (SEC Form D)

First sale	Filed with SEC	Amount sold	Investors	Avg. check	Terms	Filing
Aug 13, 2026	Aug 19, 2026	$66,264,021fully sold	13	$5.0M	EquityRule 506(b)	Form D ↗
May 7, 2026	May 20, 2026	$44,999,913fully sold	8	$5.6M	EquityRule 506(b)	Form D ↗
Jun 4, 2025	Jun 20, 2025	$13,573,980of $14.5M target	39	$348K	EquityRule 506(b)	Form D ↗
Total, three offerings		$124,837,914

First sale is the date the first investor in the offering committed to invest. Companies must file Form D within 15 days of that date, so filing dates run later.

Rounds announced by Blacksmith

What the company said publicly about its funding. Announced amounts can differ from Form D figures: an announcement can combine several closings, and some money is raised without a Form D.

Announced	Round	Amount	Investors	Source
Oct 21, 2026	Series C	$66M	Sequoia Capital (lead), Premji Invest, Peak XV Partners, GV, Y Combinator	blacksmith.sh ↗ Press release ↗ Sequoia Capital ↗
Aug 12, 2026	Series B	$45M	Peak XV Partners (lead), Y Combinator, GV	blacksmith.sh ↗ Press release ↗ Peak XV Partners ↗
Sep 18, 2025	Series A	$10M	Google Ventures (lead), Spencer Kimball, David Cramer	blacksmith.sh ↗ Press release ↗ GV ↗
May 1, 2025	Seed	$3.5M	GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator (co-leads), Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Rich Aberman, JJ Fliegelman, Eli Brown, Theo Browne	blacksmith.sh ↗ Press release ↗

Why Investors Backed Blacksmith

Investors backed Blacksmith because AI coding agents have made testing code, not writing it, the slow step in software. Blacksmith runs those builds and tests, known as CI, on its own servers. By its own figures, they run twice as fast and 60% cheaper on average. Demand has soared, too: weekly CI jobs grew from 5 million to more than 90 million in 2026. Sequoia, which led the $66 million Series C, puts it simply: "Writing code is no longer the hard part; trusting it is."

The problem it targets

CI demand is spiky. A single customer can jump from zero to tens of thousands of CPUs and back. Blacksmith's case is that rented cloud servers are slow to start, so teams either pay for idle machines or make developers wait. AI agents have made the load much heavier. In September 2026, Anthropic wrote that its CI job volume grew 25x in six months. Blacksmith hears versions of one story from customers: "Our developers adopted Claude Code, PR volume increased 4x, and our CI infrastructure can't keep up."

What the product does

Teams switch by changing one line in their GitHub Actions workflow file. Each job then runs in its own microVM on bare-metal servers with fast gaming CPUs. Caches sit in the same data center as the jobs, and Docker layers carry over between runs. It also offers Windows and Mac runners, log search and test analytics. A 2-vCPU Linux runner costs $0.004 a minute, and the first 3,000 minutes a month are free. By August 2026, it had launched codesmith, a coding agent that opens pull requests and fixes failing CI.

Progress so far

Blacksmith served more than 600 organizations at its May 2025 seed and about 800 by that September. TechCrunch then reported $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $1 million in February. By October 2026, more than 10,000 companies used it, and ARR had grown 17x since January. The CEO told Fortune that revenue is now in the tens of millions of dollars. Its largest customers each spend more than $1 million a year.

Who backs it

GV and Y Combinator co-led the $3.5 million seed in May 2025. GV General Partner Erik Nordlander led that deal and is a director. GV then led the $10 million Series A in September 2025, which closed in 14 days. TechCrunch put its valuation at $60 million. Peak XV Partners led the $45 million Series B at a $550 million valuation, announced in August 2026. Peak XV says it increased its check after signing the term sheet. Two months later, Sequoia Capital led a $66 million Series C at $1 billion, and Premji Invest joined.

How the market is moving

In October 2026, Namespace Labs, which also sells fast GitHub Actions runners, raised a $42 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners. GitHub itself is changing its prices. In December 2025, it announced hosted-runner price cuts of up to 39%, starting January 2026. It also announced a per-minute fee on self-hosted runners that, in Blacksmith's view, would hit its customers, then postponed it. Meanwhile, AI coding tools are moving into testing. Cursor launched a product in March 2026 that lets agents review and test new code, Fortune reported.

We wrote this summary from public statements by Blacksmith and its investors. It is not investment advice.