AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year
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- Blacksmith raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation, jumping from the $60 million valuation it received on its $10 million Series A less than a year ago, with GV and Y Combinator also participating and bringing total funding to $58.5 million.
- Blacksmith now serves more than 5,000 customers including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify, up from more than 700 a year earlier, according to co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash.
- Blacksmith started as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads and has since broadened its platform with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks.
- CEO Aditya Jayaprakash framed validation as a growing bottleneck as AI coding tools like Cursor, OpenAI's Codex, and Anthropic's Claude Code accelerate code generation, saying 'people are writing even more' and validating remains the chokepoint.
- Blacksmith hit a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since expanded to roughly 30 employees and 'tens of millions' in revenue, with some largest customers now spending more than $1 million per year.
- Blacksmith competes against GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation features inside Codex and Claude Code, and code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, according to the article.
Why it matters: Blacksmith nearly 10x'd its valuation in under a year by positioning itself in the validation gap left by fast-moving AI code generators — Peak XV's lead signals that the next monetization layer in AI-assisted software isn't writing code but catching it before it ships, and Blacksmith's $1 million-plus enterprise customers show that gap is already converting into real recurring spend.
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