Blacksmith hits $1B valuation with $66M Series C led by Sequoia
What's the deal? Blacksmith, a startup that provides infrastructure for testing software code before deployment, has raised $66 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital, Fortune reports. The round values the company at $1 billion.
By the numbers: The raise ranks in the 79th percentile for deal size — a sizeable round for an infrastructure startup still just two years old. Blacksmith has now raised roughly $124.5 million in total.
Why now? Just two months earlier, Blacksmith raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation. The fresh round nearly doubles that price in a matter of weeks.
What does it do? Founded in 2024, Blacksmith sells continuous-integration tools — automated builds and tests that code must pass before being merged and deployed. More than 10,000 companies now use the platform, up from about 5,000 in August; customers include Supabase, Granola, Handshake, and LangChain.
The tailwind: AI coding tools such as CursorDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, OpenAI Codex, and Anthropic's Claude Code have sped up how fast code is written, but intensified the need to test it. Weekly checks on the platform have grown from 5 million to 90 million since the start of the year.
Chief executive officer Aditya Jayaprakash said annual recurring revenue rose 17-fold over that period to "tens of millions of dollars," with the largest customers each spending more than $1 million a year.
What's the money for? Most of the funding will go toward buying computing capacity. Blacksmith purchases its own servers, places them in data centers worldwide, and builds software to run them. The company has about 40 staff in San Francisco and New York and plans to reach roughly 75 by year-end.
What could go wrong? Blacksmith faces competition from GitHub and cloud providers, as well as newer tools. Its rapid repricing also leaves little room for a stumble in growth.
The signal: Investor money is flowing across the AI-development stack — and not only into code-generation. Blacksmith's follow-on repricing shows the less-hyped testing infrastructure behind AI coding is drawing its own premium.
Read more: ua.news, TechCrunch
Image credit: Blacksmith
