Blacksmith has secured a $3.5 million seed round led by Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator, with participation from high-profile angels including Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis (Cockroach Labs), Rich Aberman (WePay), JJ Fliegelman (WayUp), Eli Brown (Guilded), and Theo Browne (T3 Chat). The round comes just over a year after Blacksmith’s founding and supports their vision to rebuild continuous integration (CI) infrastructure with speed, simplicity, and scalability in mind.
Already powering CI for over 600 companies—like Ashby, Finch, Clerk, Veed, and Mintlify—Blacksmith positions itself as a faster and more cost-efficient alternative to GitHub Actions runners. The company has not disclosed its valuation.
Blacksmith isn’t just another CI tool. It’s a complete rethinking of what CI infrastructure should look like: fast compute that’s immediately available, transparent pricing, and built-in observability. Traditional cloud providers often fall short for CI workloads, which are highly bursty and short-lived.
The team identified the growing challenge of managing CI systems in-house—especially with the increasing demand generated by AI-driven code tools. Scaling CI on platforms like AWS or GCP often requires trade-offs: overprovisioning resources or slowing down builds due to provisioning delays.
With this funding, Blacksmith plans to grow its team and continue building its purpose-built CI cloud. The startup runs its own bare-metal fleet, powered by gaming CPUs known for high single-core performance—ideal for compilation and test jobs.
By maintaining full control over its hardware and software stack, Blacksmith optimizes performance-critical workloads. They’re also investing in smarter caching and observability tools to help developers ship code more reliably and quickly.
The company was founded by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru—engineers who previously worked at Faire, Cockroach Labs, and Superblocks. Their backgrounds in core infrastructure, distributed systems, and scaled search architecture helped shape their frustration with traditional CI setups.
At Faire, Jayaprakash saw how even short CI delays could impact revenue, especially when shipping hotfixes. Those real-world pain points informed the team’s decision to build an infrastructure solution from scratch.
The seed round brings together a group of investors with deep technical roots. In addition to GV and Y Combinator, individual backers include veterans from Cockroach Labs, Guilded, WayUp, and WePay.
With this support, Blacksmith is focused on building the future of CI—starting with fast compute, then layering in intelligent observability and security to help teams ship faster and safer.
