Blacksmith Secures $45M Series B at $550M Valuation as AI Code Validation Demand Surges

AI code-testing startup Blacksmith's valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year

As AI makes coding dramatically faster, the next big challenge in software development is testing and validating all that code. Blacksmith has raised a new $45 million round to capitalize on that shift. The Series B, led by Peak XV Partners, values Blacksmith at $550 million, up from the $60 million valuation it was assigned when it raised a $10 million 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 verify software before it reaches production. The startup now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify, up from more than 700 customers less than a year ago, co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said in an exclusive interview. The rise of AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI's Codex, and Anthropic's Claude Code has made it significantly easier for software teams to generate code, but the quality of AI-generated code is not a given. "Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it's an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more," Jayaprakash said. Blacksmith started as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads, helping companies run the software builds and tests needed to validate code before it reaches production. The startup has since broadened its platform with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks. Jayaprakash said Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since grown its workforce to about 30 and grown revenue to "tens of millions of dollars." He declined to provide a specific updated ARR figure, though did say some of its largest customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform. While that appears to be solid and fast progress, Blacksmith is operating in a crowded market. Its key competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation capabilities baked into Codex and Claude Code, numerous other startups, and AI code-testing services offered by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Jayaprakash said his startup is competing on the speed of testing code as well as affordability. Looking ahead, Jayaprakash said that Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools, aiming to help developers write, validate, and merge software faster.

Blacksmith raises $45M to aid AI code validation as agentic development grows

Blacksmith Software Inc. today announced it raised $45 million in new funding as more developers adopt agentic artificial intelligence tools such as Claude Code and Codex that automatically produce significant amounts of code that require validation and testing after the fact. Peak XV Partners led the Series B round, with existing investors Y Combinator and GV also participating. The funding brings the company to a valuation of $550 million. The foundation of Blacksmith is continuous integration, which combines code development with cloud-based testing instead of on the developer's computer. This means that the entire developer team can continue working on code at the same time, submit their changes collaboratively, and then Blacksmith tests submissions as they come in, commits new changes to the codebase if they pass, rejects them when they fail and sends back notes on what went wrong when issues are found. "Writing code has gotten dramatically easier. Validating it hasn't," said co-founder and Chief Executive Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash. "Every piece of code an agent writes still has to be built, tested and reviewed before it can ship. That validation layer is going to become increasingly important as more software is written by agents." The company recently launched a service called codesmith, a cloud coding agent that developers can delegate tasks to. It moves beyond building features and fixing bugs by working inside the validation loop and diagnosing integration failures, automatically fixing them and healing submissions to the codebase. The company said that the funding will go into compute infrastructure. Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of cores and plans to grow that by an order of magnitude in the coming months to handle expected demand. Blacksmith also said jobs running on its service have grown between 5% and 10% week over week since the beginning of the year. More than 6,000 companies now use the service, including Supabase Inc., Clerk Inc., Ashby Inc. and Mercury Systems Inc., up from approximately 800 when the company announced its Series A last September. Image: SiliconANGLE / Dreamina AI

AI code testing platform Blacksmith raises $45 million led by Peak XV, valued at $550 million

Blacksmith's cofounder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash, in a blog post, said "Since the start of the year, the number of CI (Continuous Integration) jobs run on Blacksmith has grown by 5-10% week over week, as more engineers adopt AI codegen tools." CI involves certain automated tests that help expedite bug fixes, improve software quality, etc. AI code testing platform Blacksmith has raised $45 million in a round led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million. This comes in the backdrop of high adoption of AI-generated code increasing demand for tools to test, validate, and integrate software.Existing investors Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator also participated in the round, taking Blacksmith's total funding till date to $58.5 million.Blacksmith's cofounder and CEO