AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Blacksmith raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550M valuation—nearly 10x the $60M mark from its Series A less than a year ago—with GV and Y Combinator also participating, bringing total funding to $58.5M.
- Codesmith, Blacksmith's AI coding agent that automatically fixes failed code checks, represents the startup's pivot beyond its original continuous integration (CI) cloud workload business into AI-powered remediation.
- Founded in 2024, the company has grown from 700+ to 5,000+ customers in under a year—naming Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify—and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said some largest customers now spend more than $1 million annually.
- Blacksmith hit a $10M annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since grown to ~30 staff generating "tens of millions" in revenue, an efficiency profile its backers are wagering can scale.
- The startup competes on speed and affordability against GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation features inside OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, and AI code-testing services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Jayaprakash said Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader coding suite covering writing, validating, and merging software, framing validation as a growing bottleneck as AI coding tools produce more code to check.
Why it matters: The 5,000-customer base and million-dollar annual spends from top clients signal real enterprise traction, but Blacksmith faces a double squeeze: the same AI coding tools generating the code (Cursor, Codex, Claude Code) are building native validation, while AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud bundle testing into their platforms. A roughly 10x valuation pop in under a year is a bet that independent infrastructure beats the bundled incumbents before they absorb the category.
Ask SkimNews
