Blacksmith, the San Francisco-based cloud platform for validating and testing software, has raised a $45 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners that values the company at $550 million — a nearly tenfold jump from the $60 million valuation it carried less than a year ago, when it closed a $10 million Series A. Existing investors GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator both participated in the new round, tripling down on a company they backed at a fraction of its current scale, taking Blacksmith's total funding to $58.5 million.
Founded in 2024 by Aditya 'JP' Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru — a trio of Indian-origin engineers — Blacksmith began as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads, running the automated builds and tests that gate every code change before it reaches production. The company's central pitch is speed and cost: Blacksmith claims its platform can run GitHub Actions CI workflows up to twice as fast at half the cost of standard alternatives, a proposition that has found rapidly growing traction as AI coding tools accelerate how quickly engineering teams produce software.
That growth trajectory is stark by any startup benchmark. More than 6,000 companies now run continuous integration on Blacksmith, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Expensify — up from roughly 700 to 800 customers when the company announced its Series A less than a year earlier. Weekly CI job volume on the platform has grown between 5 and 10 per cent week-over-week since the start of 2026, a pace co-founder and CEO Jayaprakash attributes directly to developers adopting AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex, which are producing dramatically more code — and, in turn, more pull requests that need to be built, tested and validated before shipping.
Jayaprakash's own account of the company's growth is notably lean on headcount: Blacksmith reached $10 million in annualised revenue with just 10 employees, according to the founder, with revenue since growing to the tens of millions of dollars with a team of roughly 30. The company disclosed that it had actually raised the round back in March 2026 but delayed announcing it — a detail that suggests Blacksmith's current growth metrics, four to five months on from the raise, are likely to be materially ahead of what informed the round's pricing in the first place.
Beyond its core continuous-integration infrastructure, Blacksmith has expanded into Codesmith, a cloud coding agent developers can delegate tasks to, and Codesmith QA, an autonomous testing layer designed to validate code changes before they merge without requiring human review of every pull request. That expansion positions Blacksmith to capture value not just from running tests faster, but from automating the testing and validation logic itself — a bet that the bottleneck in AI-accelerated software development is shifting from writing code to trusting it.
Most of the new capital is earmarked for compute: Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of processor cores and plans to grow that footprint by an order of magnitude in the coming months to keep pace with demand. The company faces a competitive field that includes GitHub Actions itself, Cursor Automations, and native testing capabilities increasingly bundled into coding assistants such as Codex and Claude Code, as well as testing offerings from the three major cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — all of which have their own incentives to bundle validation tooling rather than cede the category to an independent startup.
Blacksmith's rise adds to a growing roster of infrastructure-layer AI startups founded or co-founded by Indian-origin engineers that have achieved outsized valuation growth over the past year, reflecting both the depth of Indian engineering talent within Silicon Valley's AI startup ecosystem and investors' continued appetite for the unglamorous but increasingly critical layer of tooling — testing, validation, deployment — that sits beneath the more visible AI coding assistants themselves.
The core risk investors are underwriting, according to analysts tracking the deal, is not whether demand for code validation exists — Blacksmith's sevenfold customer growth in under a year settles that question — but whether GitHub or GitLab eventually decide that validation and testing are simply features to bundle for free rather than a standalone category a third party can defend indefinitely. For now, Peak XV's willingness to lead a round at nearly ten times the company's prior valuation, alongside GV and Y Combinator's decision to double down rather than sit out, signals that the smart money is betting Blacksmith has enough of a technical and customer-relationship moat to hold its ground.
