Blacksmith, a startup that helps companies build and test software faster, has raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia. The round values the company at $1 billion, TechCrunch AI reports. The company announced it Wednesday, just two months after its last round.
The pace is the story. A year ago, Blacksmith was worth $60 million. Two months ago, it was worth $550 million. Now it’s a unicorn.
⚡ The Quick Read
- The deal: $66M Series C, led by Sequoia, at a $1B valuation
- Total raised: $125M to date
- Growth: Annual recurring revenue up 17x
- Usage: More than 90 million CI jobs run on the platform
- Customers: Mercury and Granola, among others
- Valuation path: $60M (Series A, $10M) → $550M (Series B, $45M) → $1B (Series C)
🔧 What Blacksmith Actually Does
Blacksmith works on continuous integration, or CI. That’s the automated process that builds, tests, merges and checks every code change before it ships. Each time a developer pushes code, a set of automated checks runs. Those checks are the “CI jobs” Blacksmith counts.
In a blog post about the round, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company started out to make CI “less painful.” He also said that “most companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they need to run.”
That’s a real problem. Slow CI means developers sit around waiting for tests to finish. It also means bigger cloud bills and slower releases.
🤖 Why AI Changes the Math
This is significant because AI coding agents have changed how much code gets written. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can open pull requests faster than any human team. Every one of those changes still has to be built and tested.
So the bottleneck is moving. Writing code used to be the slow part. Now it’s checking that the code works.
Jayaprakash put it this way:
“As agents write more of the world’s software, the question that matters is whether it can be trusted.”
What stands out here is the framing. Blacksmith isn’t pitching itself as an AI company. It’s pitching itself as the trust layer for AI-generated code. That’s a smart place to sit. Whichever coding agent wins, its output still has to pass through CI.
📈 Reading the Valuation
A valuation that jumps almost 17x in a year doesn’t happen on hype alone. The 17x revenue growth gives the price some grounding. Investors are paying for fast-growing usage, not just a story.
It also fits a wider pattern. Money has been flowing to the “picks and shovels” side of AI software development, meaning the tools around the coding models rather than the models themselves. Code review, testing, security scanning and deployment are all getting attention because AI agents are pushing more volume through them.
Sequoia leading the round matters too. Top-tier firms writing big checks for developer infrastructure suggests they expect CI demand to keep growing alongside AI coding adoption.
One caution: raising three rounds in about a year sets high expectations. Blacksmith now has to grow into a $1 billion price, and it competes with built-in options from the big code platforms. GitHub Actions, the CI service built into GitHub, is the default for many teams.
🧭 What This Means for Engineering Teams
If your team is adopting AI coding tools, expect your CI load to grow. A few things worth watching:
- CI costs: More AI-written pull requests mean more test runs and higher compute bills
- Wait times: Slow pipelines cancel out the speed you gain from AI coding tools
- Trust and verification: Testing is becoming your main safety net for code no human wrote line by line
- Vendor choice: Expect more startups competing on CI speed and price as this space heats up
🔭 What Comes Next
With fresh capital, Blacksmith will likely push harder into enterprise accounts and build more features aimed at checking agent-written code. The bigger question for the industry is simple. If AI writes most of the code, who checks it, and how fast? Blacksmith is betting $125 million that the answer runs through CI.
The full report is available at TechCrunch AI.