AI Code-Testing Startup Blacksmith Raises $45 Million Series B at $550 Million Valuation
Blacksmith's valuation jumped nearly tenfold in under a year as demand for validating AI-generated code accelerates CI workloads.
Overview
Blacksmith, a startup that helps engineering teams test and validate code before it ships, has raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million, according to TechCrunch. That is up from the $60 million valuation Blacksmith carried when it raised a $10 million Series A less than a year earlier, TechCrunch reported. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated in the new round, bringing the startup’s total funding to $58.5 million, per TechCrunch.
What We Know
Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and verify software before it reaches production, TechCrunch reported. The company started as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads — running the software builds and tests needed to validate code before release — and has since broadened into Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks, according to TechCrunch. Blacksmith’s own announcement describes the same product, in lowercase as “codesmith,” saying it works inside the validation loop by “diagnosing CI failures, autofixing them, and keeping pull requests green,” according to the company’s PR Newswire release.
The company was founded by Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, per the PR Newswire release. Jayaprakash, the co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview that the startup now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify, up from more than 700 customers less than a year ago. Blacksmith’s own release cites different, more recent figures: more than 6,000 companies now use the platform, including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Mercury, up from approximately 800 when the company announced its Series A last September, according to the PR Newswire release.
Jayaprakash said Blacksmith had reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees, and has since grown its workforce to about 30 while growing revenue to “tens of millions of dollars,” TechCrunch reported; he declined to give a specific updated annual recurring revenue figure but said some of the company’s largest customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform, according to the same report. “Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it’s an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more,” Jayaprakash said, per TechCrunch.
In the company’s own announcement, Jayaprakash framed the same dynamic differently: “Writing code has gotten dramatically easier. Validating it hasn’t,” he said. “We’re seeing teams adopt coding agents, generate several times more pull requests, and suddenly CI becomes a bottleneck,” according to the PR Newswire release. The release adds that the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith has grown between 5% and 10% week over week since the beginning of the year. It attributes the surge to developers adopting tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents, which the company says has led teams to produce significantly more code and open more pull requests, putting pressure on the infrastructure responsible for building, testing, and validating every change before it ships.
TechCrunch similarly noted that the rise of AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code has made it significantly easier for software teams to generate code, but that the quality of AI-generated code is not a given. The outlet reported that Blacksmith operates in a crowded market, with competitors including GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation capabilities built 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, per TechCrunch.
Most of the new capital will go toward compute, according to the PR Newswire release, which states that Blacksmith manages hundreds of thousands of cores today and plans to grow that footprint by an order of magnitude in the coming months to stay ahead of demand. Looking ahead, Jayaprakash told TechCrunch that Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools, aiming to help developers write, validate, and merge software faster.
What We Don’t Know
The two accounts of Blacksmith’s customer growth — TechCrunch’s interview-based figures and the company’s own press release — do not match: TechCrunch reported more than 5,000 customers, up from more than 700, while Blacksmith’s release put the current count above 6,000, up from approximately 800. Neither source explains the discrepancy, and Jayaprakash declined to share a specific updated annual recurring revenue figure with TechCrunch, leaving the company’s precise current revenue scale undisclosed.
Analysis
Blacksmith’s dual quotes — one telling TechCrunch that validation “is still a bottleneck,” the other telling its own press release that CI “becomes a bottleneck” as coding agents multiply pull requests — reflect the same underlying pitch to investors: as tools like Claude Code and Codex make writing code faster, the systems that check that code before it ships become the new constraint. Peak XV Partners’ bet, alongside repeat backers GV and Y Combinator, values that thesis at nearly ten times what it was worth less than a year ago.