Sumit Vishwakarma24 Oct 2026
13:21IST
New Update
AI code-testing infrastructure startup Blacksmith has raised $66 million in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the startup at $1 billion.
The round also saw participation from Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, bringing Blacksmith’s total funding to approximately $125 million.
The latest investment follows a $45 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of $550 million. That round was completed in March 2026 but announced in August.
Blacksmith said it will use the fresh capital to expand its team and computing infrastructure as demand for software testing grows alongside the adoption of AI-powered coding tools.
Founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith provides infrastructure for building and testing software through a process known as continuous integration (CI). This involves running automated checks on code changes before they are merged into an existing codebase.
The startup said the increasing use of AI coding agents has accelerated software development, creating additional pressure on the infrastructure responsible for testing and validating code.
Aditya Jayaprakash, Blacksmith’s co-founder and CEO, said developers who previously submitted three or four pull requests a day were now producing substantially more, leaving existing testing systems struggling to cope.
He said engineering teams were finding that “their CI infrastructure can’t keep up” with the growing volume of code.
Blacksmith claims its platform can complete CI jobs twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average, while reducing the need for customers to manage and scale their own computing infrastructure.
Blacksmith also reported a sharp increase in usage, with the number of CI jobs processed on its platform each week rising from five million in January 2026 to more than 90 million. Its annual recurring revenue grew 17-fold over the same period, according to the startup.
More than 10,000 companies, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake and LangChain, use Blacksmith’s platform, it said.
It currently manages nearly 10 megawatts of computing capacity across data centres in the United States and Europe and plans to expand that capacity at least fivefold in 2027.
Isaiah Boone, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said Blacksmith had recognised early that AI-generated code would require changes to software testing infrastructure. He highlighted the founding team’s “deep systems expertise and speed of execution” as factors behind the investment.
LangChain infrastructure engineer Joaquin Borggio said Blacksmith had reduced the burden of managing the company’s CI systems while “cutting our runner costs by roughly 40%”. He added that the savings did not account for the engineering time saved.
Blacksmith’s three founders met while studying at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Shah and Maru previously worked as engineers at Cockroach Labs, while Jayaprakash worked at Faire.
The investment comes as the increasing use of AI-generated code places greater emphasis on the systems used to test and validate software before it is released.
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