Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation with Sequoia-led Series C

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Blacksmith, a San Francisco company that provides infrastructure for building and testing software, announced on October 21, 2026 that it has raised a $66 million Series C round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of $1 billion. Premji Invest joined the round, along with existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator. The financing brings the company's total funding to $125 million. Blacksmith said it will use the money to grow its team and expand its compute capacity.

A startup built around continuous integration

Blacksmith works in continuous integration, or CI, the step in which every code change is built and tested before it is merged. According to the company, most businesses run CI on general-purpose cloud infrastructure, and as AI coding agents produce a larger share of code, teams face longer waits for compute and slower builds. Customers move their CI to Blacksmith by changing one line in their workflow file. The company states that CI jobs on its platform finish twice as fast and cost 60% less on average.

The company was founded in 2024 by Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, who met as undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo. Shah and Maru were early engineers at Cockroach Labs, and Jayaprakash was an engineer at Faire. Jayaprakash, who serves as chief executive, said developers who once pushed three or four pull requests a day are now pushing far more, and their CI infrastructure cannot keep up.

Growth figures behind the round

Blacksmith reports that the number of CI jobs running on its platform each week has risen from 5 million in January to more than 90 million, and that annual recurring revenue has grown 17-fold over the same period. More than 10,000 companies, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake and LangChain, use the service. Blacksmith manages close to 10 MW of compute in data centers in the United States and Europe and expects to grow that footprint at least fivefold in 2027. It is hiring engineers in New York and San Francisco.

Isaiah Boone, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said the founders understood early that the infrastructure for building and testing code would need to change as AI agents wrote more of it. An infrastructure engineer at customer LangChain said the service cut the company's runner costs by roughly 40%.

Source: Blacksmith Raises Sequoia-Led Series C at $1 Billion Valuation to Scale Code Validation