Last Updated: 14 August 2026
Blacksmith, a startup that builds cloud infrastructure for testing and validating software, has raised $45 million in a Series B round. The company sells computing power designed specifically for one job: checking whether new code actually works before it goes live. Co-founders Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru are betting that this part of the software pipeline will only get busier as AI writes more and more of the code that needs to be checked.
The reason is straightforward. AI coding assistants have become standard tools for professional developers, and they are producing code at a pace that older testing systems were never built to handle. Pull requests opened by AI agents surged from roughly 4 million in September 2025 to more than 17 million in March 2026, a fourfold increase in just six months. All of that code still needs to pass through continuous integration, commonly called CI, the automated process that builds and tests every change before it can be added to production software.
Peak XV Partners, the venture capital firm formerly known as Sequoia Capital India & SEA, led the round. Existing investors Y Combinator and GV (formerly Google Ventures) also participated. The deal values Blacksmith at $550 million and brings its total disclosed funding to $58.5 million, following a $3.5 million seed round and a $10 million Series A.
The market for CI/CD tools, which stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery, is growing quickly. According to Mordor Intelligence, it is expected to grow from $10.38 billion in 2025 to $22.92 billion by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate of about 14%. A large part of that growth is tied to teams adopting AI tools and DevOps practices that increase the volume of code changes flowing through their pipelines.
The problem is not just more code. It is faster code. When developers use AI agents to build features and fix bugs, the number of changes that need testing rises sharply. Many existing CI platforms run on general purpose cloud hardware that was not built for this kind of volume. That means longer wait times and higher costs for engineering teams. The gap between how fast code can be written and how fast it can be verified is widening.
Blacksmith's own numbers show this trend clearly. Since the beginning of 2026, CI jobs running on its platform have grown between 5% and 10% week over week. The company's customer base has jumped from roughly 800 when it announced its Series A in September 2025 to more than 6,000 today. Current customers include Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Mercury.
Most of the $45 million will go toward computing infrastructure. Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of processor cores and plans to expand that capacity by roughly tenfold in the coming months.
The company has also started building software that goes beyond making CI faster. It recently launched codesmith, a cloud coding agent that developers can hand tasks to. In addition to building features and fixing bugs, codesmith can diagnose CI failures, apply fixes automatically, and keep pull requests passing. Blacksmith is also developing codesmith QA, a planned product that will test code changes on its own before they are merged.
"Writing code has gotten dramatically easier. Validating it hasn't. We're seeing teams adopt coding agents, generate several times more pull requests, and suddenly CI becomes a bottleneck. Every piece of code an agent writes still has to be built, tested, and reviewed before it can ship. That validation layer is going to become increasingly important as more software is written by agents."
Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash, co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith
Jayaprakash, Shah, and Maru founded Blacksmith in 2024. The three met at the University of Waterloo in Canada and later worked at technology companies Cockroach Labs and Faire, where they built large scale distributed systems. Blacksmith launched as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.
The product is a CI cloud built specifically for GitHub Actions, the widely used system for automating software workflows. Rather than running on general purpose cloud servers, Blacksmith uses high performance processors tuned for speed, with caching and storage designed for CI workloads. Teams can switch to Blacksmith by changing a single line in a workflow file, which keeps the barrier to adoption low.
Beyond speed, the company is building a broader set of tools for the full code validation process, from testing through to merging.
Peak XV Partners led the Series B. The firm, based in Bengaluru, India, manages more than $10 billion in capital across 16 funds and has invested in over 450 companies. It was formerly known as Sequoia Capital India & SEA before becoming an independent entity in 2023, and its portfolio includes public companies such as Zomato and Freshworks.
Y Combinator and GV (formerly Google Ventures) both returned for this round. GV and Y Combinator co-led Blacksmith's $3.5 million seed round in May 2025, and GV led the $10 million Series A in September 2025.
