Google Ventures doubles down on dev tool startup Blacksmith just 4 months after its seed round

As speed becomes the defining currency in an AI-driven software world, Blacksmith has raised another round led by Google Ventures — just four months after its seed — to accelerate how code gets shipped.

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. At the time, Alphabet’s VC arm bet on the size of the market and the founding team, which included veterans of Cockroach Labs, another GV portfolio company. But for this round, GV was swayed by results.

Blacksmith, which offers a continuous integration and continuous delivery service for developers that complements GitHub actions, had pulled in hundreds of customers since May, and the boom in AI coding agents has blown the market wide open, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash (pictured above on the left) said in an exclusive interview.

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, Jayaprakash told TechCrunch.

Founded in January 2024, Blacksmith was born from the experiences of its founders, who met at the University of Waterloo before building large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. There, they saw firsthand how costly and unpredictable the build and unit testing stages of software releases, known as continuous integration (CI), can be.

You would have to spin up hundreds of machines and burn through hundreds of hours of computing power just to test new code before shipping it, Jayaprakash said.

A typical software development process involves developers continuously pushing new code into repositories such as GitHub or AWS CodeCommit. To manage the testing and integration of that code, cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure all offer their own solutions — but these are often slower, costlier, or less predictable than teams need.

Unlike many rivals that rent generic cloud servers from cloud providers like AWS, Blacksmith’s service runs on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs. The result, the startup says, is up to double the processing speed and lowering, by as much as 75%, compute costs. And because teams can switch by changing just a single line of code, they can start shipping faster within minutes.

“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.”

By using hardware at its premises, the startup improves its margins as it grows its customer base, the founder said.

Blacksmith also offers test analytics and an observability roadmap, giving customers deeper insights into GitHub Actions — GitHub’s CI/CD platform that automates how developers test and deploy software.

Blacksmith targets companies with teams of 500 engineers or more. Customers already running their GitHub Actions through the platform include Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED.

The latest funding round also saw participation from existing investors and angels, including Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry. Blacksmith launched out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and today has a team of 11.