GV Leads Investment in Developer Tool Maker Blacksmith Shortly After Seed Funding

As speed becomes the critical advantage in an AI-driven software landscape, Blacksmith has secured a new funding round led by Google Ventures—just four months after its seed funding—to accelerate the process of shipping code.

The $10 million Series A round closed in only 14 days, with Google Ventures increasing its investment after initially backing Blacksmith’s $3.5 million seed round in May. At that time, Alphabet’s venture capital arm was convinced by the market's potential and the founding team, which included veterans from Cockroach Labs, another GV portfolio company. This time, however, GV was persuaded by the startup's performance.

Blacksmith, which provides a continuous integration and delivery service that enhances GitHub Actions for developers, has attracted hundreds of customers since May. According to co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash (pictured left), the rapid growth of AI coding tools has significantly expanded the market opportunity.

The San Francisco-based startup reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by February with a team of just four: Jayaprakash, co-founders Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, and a product designer. Since then, revenue has grown to $3.5 million ARR with over 700 customers and a team of eight. Jayaprakash told TechCrunch the company aims to double that figure by the end of the year.

Founded in January 2024, Blacksmith originated from the founders' shared experiences. They met at the University of Waterloo and later built large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. There, they witnessed firsthand how expensive and unpredictable the build and unit testing phases—collectively known as continuous integration (CI)—can be during software releases.

Jayaprakash explained that companies often need to provision hundreds of machines and consume extensive computing resources just to test new code before deployment.

A typical software development workflow involves developers regularly pushing new code to repositories like GitHub or AWS CodeCommit. While cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure offer their own testing and integration solutions, these are often slower, more expensive, or less consistent than development teams require.

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Unlike many competitors that lease standard cloud servers from providers like AWS, Blacksmith operates on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs. The startup claims this approach can double processing speeds and reduce computing costs by up to 75%. Since teams can integrate the service by changing just one line of code, they can begin deploying faster in a matter of minutes.

“By taking a bare-metal approach, we have significantly better control over our economics compared to the hyperscalers,” Jayaprakash told TechCrunch. “I’m not suggesting every company should go bare-metal, but for compute-intensive businesses like ours, where efficiency is paramount, it offers substantial margin control and flexibility.”

The founder added that by using its own hardware, Blacksmith improves its profit margins as its customer base expands.

In addition to core CI/CD services, Blacksmith provides test analytics and an observability roadmap, giving customers deeper visibility into their GitHub Actions workflows—GitHub’s platform for automating software testing and deployment.

Blacksmith focuses on serving organizations with engineering teams of 500 or more. Current customers using the platform for GitHub Actions include Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED.

The recent funding round also included participation from existing investors and angel backers such as Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry. Blacksmith emerged from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort and now employs a team of 11.