US-based software infrastructure startup Blacksmith has raised $66 million in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation, as it looks to address a growing bottleneck in AI-driven software development: testing and validating code.
The round also includes Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator. The latest funding brings Blacksmith’s total capital raised to $125 million and will support team expansion and a larger computing infrastructure footprint.
Founded in 2024 by Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith builds infrastructure for continuous integration (CI), the process of automatically building and testing software changes before they are merged into a codebase.
As AI coding tools allow developers to generate code faster, the workload required to validate that code is also rising. Blacksmith is betting that specialised infrastructure can help engineering teams keep pace without increasing costs or managing complex computing resources themselves.
Why AI Coding Is Increasing Demand for Testing Infrastructure
Writing code has traditionally been a major part of software development. With AI coding agents taking on more of that work, testing, building and validating the resulting code can become the next constraint.
Blacksmith says general-purpose cloud infrastructure is often poorly suited to CI workloads, where demand can fluctuate sharply as developers submit changes. Its platform is designed to handle these spikes without requiring customers to provision and maintain their own CI infrastructure.
According to the company, developers using Blacksmith complete CI jobs twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average compared with their previous setup. These are company-reported figures, rather than independently verified industry-wide results.
Blacksmith’s Growth: 90 Million CI Jobs a Week
Blacksmith says its growth has accelerated alongside the adoption of AI coding tools. Since January 2026, weekly CI jobs on its platform have increased from 5 million to more than 90 million, while annual recurring revenue (ARR) has grown 17-fold, according to the company.
More than 10,000 companies now use the platform, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake and LangChain. Blacksmith manages nearly 10 megawatts of computing capacity across data centres in the US and Europe, and plans to expand that footprint at least fivefold in 2027.
The company’s infrastructure is built around continuous integration workloads, which can fluctuate sharply as developers submit code changes. Instead of requiring each customer to manage its own computing capacity, Blacksmith lets developers switch through a change to their workflow configuration.
Founders and Investors Back the Next Phase
Blacksmith was founded in 2024 by Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, who met while studying at the University of Waterloo. Shah and Maru previously worked at Cockroach Labs, while Jayaprakash was an engineer at Faire.
Sequoia Capital’s investment builds on Blacksmith’s earlier backing from Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator. The company raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation, announced in August 2026, before this latest round valued it at $1 billion.
The investment reflects a growing focus on the infrastructure needed to support AI-assisted software development. As coding agents produce more changes, companies will need reliable ways to build, test and validate those changes before releasing them. Blacksmith is positioning itself to serve that demand, but it will need to maintain reliability and cost advantages as its computing footprint expands.
Source:- https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/series-c
