Blacksmith Raises $45M Series B at $550M Valuation as AI Coding Tools Drive CI Demand

Blacksmith, a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads, has raised a $45 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million. The round brings Blacksmith's total funding to $58.5 million and marks a roughly 10x jump from the $60 million valuation the company held at its Series A less than a year earlier. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator participated in the round. The valuation and revenue figures were disclosed in an exclusive TechCrunch interview with co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash (TechCrunch).

Founded in 2024, Blacksmith began as a cloud infrastructure provider for CI workloads and has since added Codesmith, an AI coding agent that automatically fixes failed code checks. The product expansion places Blacksmith at the intersection of two trends that have been reshaping developer infrastructure: the migration of CI pipelines to specialized cloud providers, and the deployment of AI agents to reduce the manual burden of maintaining build health.

Blacksmith's customer base has grown from more than 700 to more than 5,000 in less than a year, according to Jayaprakash. The company's customers include Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. Some of Blacksmith's largest customers spend more than $1 million annually on the platform.

The revenue trajectory is striking even by the standards of recent infrastructure startups. Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since grown to approximately 30 employees, with revenue now in the "tens of millions of dollars." The capital efficiency of that revenue-per-employee ratio is the kind of data point that tends to concentrate investor attention, particularly in a funding environment where growth-at-all-costs narratives have given way to more disciplined deployment.

Blacksmith's prior round was a $10 million Series A led by Google Ventures, reported in September 2025 (TechCrunch). GV's continued participation in the Series B, alongside Y Combinator, signals sustained conviction from early backers as the company's valuation scaled.

The broader context here is that AI-assisted coding tools are generating substantially more code, which in turn generates substantially more CI workload. Every line of code produced by an AI agent or copilot still needs to be compiled, tested, and validated before it reaches production. If anything, the volume of code being pushed through CI pipelines may be growing faster than the capacity of engineering teams to review it manually, which creates direct demand for both faster CI infrastructure and automated remediation of build failures. Codesmith, Blacksmith's agent that auto-fixes failed checks, sits squarely in that gap.

The combination is a useful illustration of a second-order effect that those of us watching the AI tooling wave have been tracking: the primary products in the space are coding assistants and agents, but the infrastructure layer that has to absorb their output is itself a market. When an AI coding agent generates a pull request that fails a test suite, the cost of that failure, in developer time and pipeline minutes, does not disappear. It shifts downstream. Companies like Blacksmith are positioning to capture the value of handling that shift.

Peak XV Partners leading the round also carries a signal. The firm, formerly Sequoia Capital India, has been expanding its investments in U.S.-based developer infrastructure and enterprise software. For a two-year-old company with fewer than 50 employees to command a half-billion-dollar valuation, the implicit thesis is that CI infrastructure augmented by AI remediation can become a category-defining layer in the developer toolchain.

The risk, as with any infrastructure startup riding a demand surge, is that the underlying driver, in this case AI-generated code volume, could shift if the major LLM providers and IDE vendors build CI and remediation features into their own platforms. Blacksmith's bet is that specialized, performance-optimized CI infrastructure combined with agentic fix capabilities will retain value even as general-purpose AI coding tools mature.

For now, the numbers speak for themselves. A company founded in 2024, with roughly 30 employees and tens of millions in revenue, has convinced investors to place a $550 million bet that the CI layer is where the AI coding boom lands.