Blacksmith Raises $66 Million at $1 Billion Valuation to Speed Up Code Testing
Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies build and test software, including code written by AI, has raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation. The company announced the round on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, in a press release distributed over PR Newswire. Fortune reported the valuation in an exclusive the same day.
The round brings Blacksmith's total funding to $125 million. The company says it will use the new capital to grow its team and expand its compute footprint, meaning the cloud machines that run customers' build and test jobs. Sequoia said on its own website that it is proud to lead the Series C. Its post, titled "Partnering with Blacksmith" and written by Isaiah Boone, describes the company's growth in CI volume. CI, or continuous integration, is an automated system that builds a codebase and runs its tests every time a developer submits a change.
The Series C follows a $45 million Series B, led by Peak XV Partners, that valued Blacksmith at $550 million and closed two months earlier. Before that, the company raised a $10 million Series A led by Google Ventures. That round, announced in September 2025, was aimed at faster, more cost-effective continuous integration for GitHub Actions, GitHub's built-in automation service. It set Blacksmith's valuation at $60 million.
Blacksmith's co-founder and CEO, Aditya Jayaprakash, has said the company was founded to make continuous integration less painful. The company reports that its annual recurring revenue grew 17x and that it has run over 90 million CI jobs. Sequoia's post gives a separate growth figure: weekly CI jobs rose 18x in 2026 alone, from 5 million to 90 million.
Blacksmith names Mercury and Granola among its customers.
The broader context here is the pipeline behind AI-assisted development. Coding assistants can produce changes faster than teams can review them by hand, which pushes more of the verification burden onto automated build, test and CI systems. Blacksmith's pitch is that the CI layer itself has become a throughput problem, and that it can be solved with faster runners, the machines that execute jobs, and a lower cost per job on hosted GitHub Actions workflows. Whether that framing holds across a wider set of customers is a question the funding does not answer.
In my view, the valuation tells us more about investor expectations than about current profitability. A tenfold-plus rise in job volume and a 17x revenue increase are strong growth signals, but neither figure, on its own, says anything about gross margin on compute, retention, or how much of the growth comes from a small number of heavy users. Those are the numbers an expert reader will want before drawing a conclusion about durability.
Still, the direction is clear enough to be useful. If AI-written code keeps increasing commit and pull request volume, the teams that can validate changes quickly, cheaply and reliably will spend less time waiting on red builds. The more practical question for engineering leaders is whether their own CI spend and queue times are scaling with the code their developers now produce. Blacksmith's funding is one signal that a growing number of vendors think the answer matters.
