Sequoia Leads $66 Million Round in Blacksmith

<p><strong><span class&equals;"legendSpanClass">SAN FRANCISCO<&sol;span> <&sol;strong>&&num;8212&semi; <a href&equals;"https&colon;&sol;&sol;edge&period;prnewswire&period;com&sol;c&sol;link&sol;&quest;t&equals;0&amp&semi;l&equals;en&amp&semi;o&equals;4802742-1&amp&semi;h&equals;1765873491&amp&semi;u&equals;https&percnt;3A&percnt;2F&percnt;2Fwww&period;blacksmith&period;sh&percnt;2F&amp&semi;a&equals;Blacksmith" target&equals;"&lowbar;blank" rel&equals;"nofollow noopener">Blacksmith<&sol;a>&comma; an infrastructure platform for building and testing code&comma; has scored a &dollar;66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a &dollar;1 billion valuation&comma; with participation from Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners&comma; GV and Y Combinator&period; The round brings Blacksmith&&num;8217&semi;s total funding to &dollar;125 million and will enable the company to grow its team and expand its compute footprint&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>For years&comma; writing code was the slow part of shipping software&period; With AI coding agents now producing a large and growing share of the world&&num;8217&semi;s code&comma; the burden has changed from writing code to validating it&period; Every change still has to be built and tested before it can be merged&comma; a step known as continuous integration&comma; or CI&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Most companies run CI on general-purpose cloud infrastructure that was never designed for it&period; As developers push more code&comma; teams hit longer waits for compute&comma; slower builds on older-generation CPUs&comma; and a constant fight between over- and under-provisioning&period; Anthropic <a href&equals;"https&colon;&sol;&sol;edge&period;prnewswire&period;com&sol;c&sol;link&sol;&quest;t&equals;0&amp&semi;l&equals;en&amp&semi;o&equals;4802742-1&amp&semi;h&equals;2413040750&amp&semi;u&equals;https&percnt;3A&percnt;2F&percnt;2Fclaude&period;com&percnt;2Fblog&percnt;2Fagentic-coding-is-straining-ci-heres-how-we-scaled-test-impact-analysis-at-anthropic&amp&semi;a&equals;reported" target&equals;"&lowbar;blank" rel&equals;"nofollow noopener">reported<&sol;a> last month that its own CI volume grew 25x in six months as Claude took over most of its code output&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;Since Claude Code took off in March&comma; almost every conversation we&&num;8217&semi;ve had with a large engineering team has started the same way&period; Developers who used to push three or four pull requests a day are now pushing orders of magnitude more and their CI infrastructure can&&num;8217&semi;t keep up&period; We&&num;8217&semi;re grateful to our customers who are trusting us to solve this bottleneck&comma; and excited to partner with Sequoia to solve it at scale&comma;&&num;8221&semi; said Aditya &&num;8220&semi;JP&&num;8221&semi; Jayaprakash&comma; co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>CI is the most variable workload a company runs&colon; a single customer&&num;8217&semi;s demand regularly jumps from zero to tens of thousands of CPUs and back again&period; Blacksmith has designed every part of its infrastructure stack to absorb those spikes as a matter of routine&period; Customers switch with a one-line change to their workflow file and never provision&comma; scale or maintain their CI infrastructure again&period; Developers using Blacksmith see their CI jobs complete twice as fast and at 60&percnt; lower cost on average&comma; with zero operational overhead&period; Since January&comma; the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith each week has grown from 5 million to more than 90 million&comma; and annual recurring revenue has grown 17x&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;JP and team understood early that as AI agents wrote more code&comma; the infrastructure to build and test it would need to change&comma;&&num;8221&semi; said Isaiah Boone&comma; Partner at Sequoia Capital&period; &&num;8220&semi;What stood out to us was their deep systems expertise and speed of execution&period; That has translated into a product that helps their customers test and ship their software faster&period; We believe that foundation gives Blacksmith room to build much more as the demands of software development change&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Blacksmith was founded in 2024 by Jayaprakash&comma; Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru&comma; who met as undergraduates at the University of Waterloo&period; Shah and Maru were early engineers at Cockroach Labs&comma; and Jayaprakash was an engineer at Faire&period; All three are developers who have run spiky&comma; large-scale infrastructure before&comma; and they built Blacksmith on the bet that testing code&comma; not writing it&comma; would become the constraint on shipping software&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>More than 10&comma;000 companies&comma; including Ashby&comma; Granola&comma; Handshake and LangChain&comma; now run their CI on Blacksmith&period; The company manages nearly 10 MW of compute across data centers in the United States and Europe and is on track to grow that footprint at least 5x in 2027&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<div class&equals;"pull-right inline-gallery-container col-md-8 col-sm-7 col-xs-12">&NewLine;<div class&equals;"gallery inline-gallery">&NewLine;<div class&equals;"row">&NewLine;<div class&equals;"col-sm-12 clearfix"><&sol;div>&NewLine;<&sol;div>&NewLine;<&sol;div>&NewLine;<&sol;div>&NewLine;