The dev tools startup, born from Cockroach Labs and Y Combinator alumni, is speeding up CI/CD with bare-metal infrastructure and rapid revenue growth.
Speed and Scale: The New DevOps Imperative
In an AI-fueled software landscape where speed is the new currency, Blacksmith is gaining traction fast. The San Francisco-based CI/CD infrastructure startup has closed a $10 million Series A, led again by Google Ventures, just four months after its $3.5 million seed.
- The round closed in just 14 days, a sign of investor urgency.
- GV’s doubling down was driven not just by vision—but hard numbers.
Fast Climb: From $1M to $3.5M ARR in Months
Founded in January 2024, Blacksmith has seen explosive growth:
- Hit $1 million ARR by February—with only 4 employees.
- Now at $3.5 million ARR and 700+ customers, supported by a team of just 8.
- Targeting to double ARR by year-end, says CEO Aditya Jayaprakash.
These figures are especially striking given the company’s lean structure and short timeline since launch.
The Problem: Slow, Costly Continuous Integration
Blacksmith was built to solve a core bottleneck in modern software development: the cost and speed of continuous integration (CI).
- Testing and building software pre-release often demands hundreds of hours of compute time.
- Existing solutions from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud can be slow, costly, and unpredictable.
Jayaprakash and co-founders Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru experienced these issues firsthand at Faire and Cockroach Labs.
The Blacksmith Advantage: Bare-Metal Speed and Cloud-Like Ease
Rather than rely on hyperscaler cloud services, Blacksmith takes a bold “bare-metal” approach, running its infrastructure on high-performance gaming-grade CPUs.
- Delivers up to 2x faster processing speeds
- Cuts compute costs by as much as 75%
- Simple onboarding: just one line of code to switch
“If you’re a compute-heavy company, bare metal gives you unmatched control over economics,” Jayaprakash said.
Blacksmith’s strategy delivers better performance at lower cost, and as customer volume grows, margin control improves.
Built for Scale: 500+ Engineer Teams in Mind
Blacksmith targets large engineering orgs, typically 500 developers or more, looking to accelerate their CI/CD pipelines without breaking the bank.
Notable customers include:
- Supabase
- Chroma
- Mintlify
- Ashby
- Clerk
- Pylon
- Devsisters
- VEED
Blacksmith’s edge also includes test analytics, GitHub Actions observability tools, and an upcoming roadmap of performance monitoring features.
Backed by Industry Veterans and YC
Blacksmith launched from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, and is now a team of 11.
- Google Ventures (GV) has now led both seed and Series A rounds.
- Angels include:
- Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs
- David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry
Their support affirms Blacksmith’s position at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and developer productivity—two of the most valuable themes in enterprise software today.
What’s Next
With fresh capital, Blacksmith will:
- Double headcount, expanding engineering and go-to-market
- Build more observability and AI-integrated features
- Scale infrastructure while keeping tight control of unit economics
Its growth is also fueled by the rising adoption of AI coding agents, which dramatically increase code shipping frequency—and demand fast, cost-effective CI/CD solutions.
