Peak XV-Backed AI Startup Blacksmith Nets $66 Mn At A Unicorn Valuation

San Francisco-based AI code testing startup Blacksmith has secured $66 Mn in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The funding brings the company's total funding raised to $125 Mn. Additional investors included Premji Invest, and existing backers Peak XV Partners, Google Ventures, and Y Combinator. The startup achieved a unicorn valuation of $1 Bn in just over two months, doubling from its $550 Mn valuation during its $45 Mn Series B funding round in August.

Blacksmith plans to expand its compute infrastructure and engineering team to handle the increasing enterprise demand for its services.

Founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, the company operates a specialized cloud platform that automatically builds and tests software code. Blacksmith currently manages a compute footprint of nearly 10 MW across data centers in the US and Europe, with plans to increase this capacity by five times by 2027. The startup claims to serve over 10,000 corporate customers, including high-growth tech firms like Mercury, Granola, Supabase, and LangChain.

As AI accelerates code writing, the bottleneck for software shipping lies in validating and testing code - a process known as continuous integration (CI). Blacksmith's platform is tailored to handle the fluctuating nature of CI demand with minimal operational overhead compared to general-purpose cloud infrastructure. In the past year, weekly CI jobs processed on Blacksmith have surged from 5 Mn to over 90 Mn, resulting in a 17X increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during the same period.