The business has scaled quickly with a relatively small team. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with 10 employees. It now has about 30 employees and generates “tens of millions” in revenue, although he did not disclose a precise current figure. Some of its largest customers spend more than $1 million annually.
Blacksmith is building around a problem that has become more pronounced as developers adopt AI coding products such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code. Those tools can accelerate code creation, but the resulting software still needs to pass builds, tests and other checks before it can be deployed. As developers produce more code, the volume requiring validation increases with it.
“Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it’s an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more,” Jayaprakash said.
The company began by providing cloud infrastructure for CI workloads, giving development teams another option for running automated builds and tests. It has since introduced Codesmith, an AI agent that attempts to repair code after a check fails. The product moves Blacksmith beyond running tests and into responding to the problems those tests uncover.
That expansion puts the startup against competitors on several fronts. GitHub Actions serves the CI market, while Cursor Automations addresses related developer workflows. Codex and Claude Code have their own validation capabilities, and Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud also provide AI-powered code-testing services.
Jayaprakash said Blacksmith aims to differentiate through faster test execution and lower pricing. The challenge is maintaining those advantages as larger platforms expand the range of development tasks their products can handle. AI coding tools that generate software can also incorporate more testing into their agent workflows, potentially reducing the need for separate products at parts of the validation layer.
Blacksmith is responding by broadening its ambitions beyond CI. The company plans to develop a larger suite of tools covering more of the process developers use to write, validate and merge software. Codesmith is an early extension of that strategy, adding automated remediation to the testing infrastructure Blacksmith already provides.
The $45 million Series B gives Blacksmith additional capital to pursue that expansion while demand for AI-assisted software development continues to reshape testing workloads. The company has already demonstrated that businesses will pay for dedicated validation infrastructure; its next challenge is defending that position as GitHub, cloud providers and AI coding companies push further into the same part of the development process.
This analysis is based on reporting from Bitcoin World.
Image courtesy of Blacksmith.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
