Blacksmith raises $45M Series B, valuation jumps nearly 10x to $550M
What's the deal? AI code-testing startup Blacksmith has raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing total funding to $58.5 million.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and verify software before it reaches production. It started as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads and has since added Codesmith, an AI coding agent that automatically fixes failed code checks.
Why now? The rise of AI coding tools such as CursorDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, OpenAI's CodexDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Anthropic's Claude CodeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has made generating code far easier — but not reliably good. "Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it's an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more," co-founder and chief executive officer Aditya Jayaprakash said.
The valuation marks a sharp climb from the $60 million Blacksmith was assigned in 2025, when it raised a $10 million Series A. The round sits in the top fifth of comparable deals by size.
By the numbers: Blacksmith now serves more than 5,000 customers — including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify — up from more than 700 in 2025. Revenue has grown from a $10 million annualized run rate to "tens of millions of dollars," Jayaprakash said, with some of its largest customers spending more than $1 million a year. The team has grown from 10 employees to about 30.
What could go wrong? Blacksmith operates in a crowded market. Competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation baked into Codex and Claude Code, and code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Jayaprakash said it competes on testing speed and affordability.
The signal: As AI accelerates code generation, the bottleneck is shifting to testing and validation — and investors are betting the picks-and-shovels layer of AI software development is where fast growth now lies.
Image credit: Blacksmith
Read more: TechCrunch
