Software development has become faster because artificial intelligence writes code, but testing and validating that output is now the primary hurdle. Blacksmith has raised a new $45 million round to address this gap.
The valuation jump
The Series B, led by Peak XV Partners, values Blacksmith at $550 million. This is a tenfold increase from the $60 million valuation it held when it raised a $10 million Series A less than a year ago. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing the startup’s total funding to $58.5 million.
Growth figures
Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and verify software before it reaches production. The startup now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. This is up from more than 700 customers less than a year ago, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said in an exclusive interview.
Why the bottleneck exists
The rise of AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code has made it easier for software teams to generate code. The quality of AI-generated code is not guaranteed. “Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it’s an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more,” Jayaprakash said.
What the company does
Blacksmith started as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads, helping companies run the software builds and tests needed to validate code before it reaches production. The startup has since broadened its platform with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks.
Revenue and staff
Jayaprakash said Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees. The company has since grown its workforce to about 30 and grown revenue to tens of millions of dollars. He declined to provide a specific updated ARR figure, though he did say some of its largest customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform.
Competitive landscape
Blacksmith is operating in a crowded market. Its key competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation capabilities baked into Codex and Claude Code, numerous other startups, and AI code-testing services offered by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Jayaprakash said his startup is competing on the speed of testing code as well as affordability.
Future plans
Looking ahead, Jayaprakash said that Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools. The goal is to help developers write, validate, and merge software faster.
