As AI dramatically speeds up coding, the next big challenge in software development is testing and validating all code. Blacksmith has raised $45 million in new funding to take advantage of the change.
The Series B, led by Peak XV Partners, values Blacksmith at $550 million, an increase from the $60 million valuation it was assigned when it raised $10 million in Series A less than a year ago. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing the startup’s total funding to $58.5 million.
Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and validate software before putting it into production. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said in an exclusive interview that the startup went from having more than 700 customers less than a year ago to now serving more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Expensify.
The rise of AI coding tools like Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code has made it much easier for software teams to generate code, but the quality of AI-generated code cannot be taken for granted.
“Code validation is still a bottleneck, but it’s become an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing more code,” Jayaprakash says.
Blacksmith started as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads, helping businesses run the software builds and tests needed to validate code before it reaches production. The startup then expanded its platform with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks.
Jayaprakash said Blacksmith reached $10 million in annual revenue with just 10 employees and has since grown to about 30 employees and revenue in the “tens of millions of dollars.” He declined to provide specific, up-to-date ARR numbers, but said some of the largest customers currently spend more than $1 million annually on the platform.
While this appears to be steady and rapid progress, Blacksmith operates in a crowded market. Key competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, the built-in validation capabilities of Codex and Claude Code, and numerous other startups, as well as AI code testing services provided by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Jayaprakash said his startup competes on code testing speed and affordability.
Looking to the future, Jayaprakash said Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools, with the goal of helping developers create, verify and merge software faster.
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