Blacksmith, a startup founded in 2024, has raised $45 million in a new Series B round led by Peak XV Partners. The financing sets the company's valuation at $550 million, up from the $60 million valuation tied to the $10 million Series A it raised less than a year ago. Existing backers GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing total funding to $58.5 million.
What the company does
Blacksmith focuses on automating testing and verification of software before it reaches production. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the platform helps companies build, test, and verify code. The startup began as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads and later expanded its offering with Codesmith, an AI coding agent designed to automatically fix failed code checks.
Customers, revenue and team
Jayaprakash told Reuters in an exclusive interview that Blacksmith's customer base grew from more than 700 to over 5,000 in under a year; customers include Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. The company reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate (ARR) with just 10 employees, and has since grown to roughly 30 employees while increasing revenue to what Jayaprakash described as “tens of millions of dollars.” He declined to give a current ARR figure. He also said some of Blacksmith’s largest customers now spend more than $1 million per year on the platform.
Competitive landscape
Blacksmith is operating in a crowded market. Key competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation features built into OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, other startups, and AI code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Jayaprakash said the company competes on test speed and affordability.
Future plans
Looking ahead, Jayaprakash said Blacksmith intends to broaden its suite of coding tools to help developers write, validate, and merge software faster. The recent funding and customer growth are aimed at accelerating platform development amid strong competition from major cloud and AI providers.
