Sequoia leads series C for US cloud startup at $1b valuation

Blacksmith, a platform aimed at streamlining software development and testing, particularly for code generated by AI, announced on Wednesday a $66 million Series C funding round, led by Sequoia, which has now placed the company's valuation at an impressive $1 billion. Aditya Jayaprakash, the co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith, articulated in a blog post that the company was established with the goal of making continuous integration (CI) - the process of building, testing, merging, and validating code changes - less challenging.

He noted that "most companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they need to run," particularly in the current context where substantial code creation is driven by AI. Jayaprakash added, "As agents write more of the world’s software, the question that matters is whether it can be trusted." Beyond the funding, Blacksmith disclosed that its annual recurring revenue has expanded 17 times and that it has executed over 90 million CI jobs, or individual automated code checks.

The company's clientele includes Mercury and Granola. This funding round follows closely on the heels of a $45 million Series B round earlier this year, which previously valued Blacksmith at $550 million. A year prior, Blacksmith was valued at $60 million following a $10 million Series A round. To date, the company has successfully raised $125 million in funding.