Overview
- Blacksmith closed a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia on Wednesday, taking the company’s valuation to $1 billion and bringing total funding to roughly $125 million.
- The startup says weekly continuous integration (CI) jobs on its platform rose from about 5 million in January to more than 90 million and that annual recurring revenue has grown 17-fold over the same period.
- Blacksmith buys and operates its own servers and today manages nearly 10 megawatts of compute across U.S. and European data centers with plans to grow capacity at least fivefold in 2027.
- The company sells purpose-built CI runners and caching tools that it says run tests twice as fast and at roughly 60% lower cost than general-purpose cloud machines, while also offering agent tooling to diagnose and fix failing tests.
- Investors point to strong demand from AI code generation for the funding but analysts warn that larger platforms such as GitHub, cloud providers, and AI model vendors could add built-in validation and pressure Blacksmith’s standalone market over time.