Blacksmith

Developer Tools · AI Infrastructure

Milestone

Blacksmith hits $1B valuation after $66M Series C led by Sequoia

As AI agents write code faster than humans can review it, testing infrastructure has become the new chokepoint for shipping software.

• Blacksmith raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the AI code-testing infrastructure startup at $1 billion just two months after a $550 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners.
• Blacksmith runs continuous integration (CI) infrastructure, the automated build-and-test pipeline code must pass before shipping, using its own bare-metal servers in data centers instead of renting from AWS, Google Cloud or Azure.
• Platform usage has doubled since August, from about 5,000 companies to more than 10,000, while weekly validation checks jumped from 5 million at the start of the year to 90 million.
• Annual recurring revenue has grown 17x since January to the tens of millions, with the largest customers now spending more than $1 million a year on the platform.
• Total funding now stands at about $124.5 million; most of the fresh capital will go toward buying more compute as headcount grows from roughly 40 to about 75 employees by year-end.
• Founded in 2024, Blacksmith competes in a fast-heating developer-tooling niche: rival CodeRabbit raised $143 million at a $1.5 billion valuation just two months earlier for AI-driven code review.
• AI coding tools now let developers generate code faster than it can be tested, turning the build-and-test pipeline into software development's new bottleneck and drawing a wave of investor interest to validation infrastructure.