San Francisco - Sep 18, 2025 (UTC) - Blacksmith has raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Google Ventures, to deliver CI that’s faster, more cost-effective, and increasingly observable for engineering teams on GitHub Actions. The round — closed in just 14 days — includes participation from previous backers and notable angels like Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, Co-founder of Sentry.
Blacksmith makes CI faster, more cost-effective, and more reliable by avoiding hyperscaler-based solutions and running GitHub Actions on high-performance hardware with gaming-grade CPUs — tuned for maximum throughput and enhanced with growing observability capabilities. Blacksmith doubles CI speed and cuts compute costs by up to 75%. Teams migrate with just one line of code and start shipping faster within minutes.
The San Francisco–based startup hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in February with just four people — Jayaprakash, co-founders Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, and a product designer. Since then, revenue has reached $3.5 million ARR with more than 700 customers, supported by a team of eight, and the company is aiming to double that figure by year’s end.
“Most of the time, CI just gets in the way,” said Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Co-Founder and CEO of Blacksmith. “We built Blacksmith to remove that drag, deliver predictable speed and cost savings, and now, to give teams more insight into what’s really happening inside their pipelines. This is even more important for teams that are using AI codegen tools and want to move quickly.”
“Because we’re going the bare-metal route, we have much better control over our economics compared to the hyperscalers,” Jayaprakash told TechCrunch. “I’m not saying every company should go bare metal… but if you are a compute company, if you are an infra company, where your bread and butter is compute, like ourselves, it makes a lot of sense, and it gives us abundant control over our margins.”
Since launching out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, Blacksmith has steadily grown to $1M in ARR, with revenue tripling in just the past four months. More than 800 companies, including Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED now run their GitHub Actions through Blacksmith.
“Blacksmith cut our test times in half without us lifting more than a pull request,” said Kamil Ogórek, API Lead Engineer at Supabase. “Feels like we’re cheating, but we’ll take it.”
Beyond cost and speed, Blacksmith now gives teams instant clarity to diagnose failures, unifying test results from parallel runs in a single searchable view. Teams can spot real failures, flaky tests, and infrastructure issues quickly, without overhead, engineering effort, or the hefty price tag of traditional monitoring suites.
The $10 million Series A closed in just 14 days, with Google Ventures doubling down after first backing Blacksmith’s $3.5 million seed in May. With the new funding, Blacksmith will expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, open offices in San Francisco and New York City, and continue building out its observability stack for GitHub Actions — starting with test analytics and extending into all pain points that stop a developer from merging their code.
Founders Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru met at the University of Waterloo and went on to build large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. They know firsthand how costly it is when CI is slow, unpredictable, and opaque, and how much harder that gets in AI-driven development.
About Blacksmith
Blacksmith makes CI faster, more cost-effective, and more reliable by avoiding hyperscaler-based solutions and running GitHub Actions on high-performance hardware with gaming-grade CPUs — tuned for maximum throughput and enhanced with growing observability capabilities. This approach eliminates build bottlenecks, lowers infrastructure costs, and gives teams a clear view into pipeline health. In the AI era, where rapid iteration is critical, Blacksmith keeps development cycles moving — enabling faster validation, safer deployments, and more competitive release schedules. Founded in 2024 by engineers from Faire and Cockroach Labs, Blacksmith is backed by Google Ventures, Y Combinator, and leading dev infrastructure angels.
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