Blacksmith Raises $10M to Unblock AI Development with Fast CI for GitHub Actions

In the AI era, where models and agents evolve through dozens of daily iterations, slow CI isn't just frustrating — it's a growth killer.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuous Integration (CI) shouldn't be the part of the day developers dread — but too often it's slow, costly, and unpredictable. In the era of AI and AI agents, where iteration speed determines competitiveness, those inefficiencies aren't just annoying; they can make ambitious development timelines impossible. Blacksmith is fixing that. The company has raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Google Ventures, to deliver CI that's faster, more cost-effective, and increasingly observable for engineering teams on GitHub Actions.

The round — closed in just 14 days — includes participation from previous backers and notable angels like Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, Co-founder of Sentry. For a process that hasn't meaningfully changed in years, the speed of the raise says a lot about how overdue this solution is.

Speed and cost savings without the tradeoffs

Blacksmith doubles CI speed and cuts compute costs by up to 75%. Teams migrate with just one line of code and start shipping faster within minutes.

Unlike most CI providers, Blacksmith avoids renting generic cloud hardware like AWS. Instead, they use high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs tuned for speed. This ensures predictable performance, no queuing, and maximized hardware efficiency.

A new push for observability

Beyond cost and speed, Blacksmith now gives teams instant clarity to diagnose failures, unifying test results from parallel runs in a single searchable view. Teams can spot real failures, flaky tests, and infrastructure issues quickly, without overhead, engineering effort, or the hefty price tag of traditional monitoring suites.

Complete test visibility via test analytics is just the first step. Blacksmith's observability roadmap will extend to broader insights for GitHub Actions: capabilities that historically required in-house tooling or expensive SaaS platforms.

Faster feedback means faster progress

"Most of the time, CI just gets in the way," said Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Co-Founder and CEO of Blacksmith. "We built Blacksmith to remove that drag, deliver predictable speed and cost savings, and now, to give teams more insight into what's really happening inside their pipelines. This is even more important for teams that are using AI codegen tools and want to move quickly."

Since launching out of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Blacksmith has steadily grown to $1M in ARR, with revenue tripling in just the past four months. More than 800 companies, including Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED now run their GitHub Actions through Blacksmith.

"Blacksmith cut our test times in half without us lifting more than a pull request," said Kamil Ogórek, API Lead Engineer at Supabase. "Feels like we're cheating, but we'll take it."

Built by engineers who've been there

Founders Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru met at the University of Waterloo and went on to build large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. They know firsthand how costly it is when CI is slow, unpredictable, and opaque, and how much harder that gets in AI-driven development.

With the new funding, Blacksmith will expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, open offices in San Francisco and New York City, and continue building out its observability stack for GitHub Actions — starting with test analytics and extending into all pain points that stop a developer from merging their code.

About Blacksmith

Blacksmith makes CI faster, more cost-effective, and more reliable by avoiding hyperscaler-based solutions and running GitHub Actions on high-performance hardware with gaming-grade CPUs — tuned for maximum throughput and enhanced with growing observability capabilities. This approach eliminates build bottlenecks, lowers infrastructure costs, and gives teams a clear view into pipeline health. In the AI era, where rapid iteration is critical, Blacksmith keeps development cycles moving — enabling faster validation, safer deployments, and more competitive release schedules. Founded in 2024 by engineers from Faire and Cockroach Labs, Blacksmith is backed by Google Ventures, Y Combinator, and leading dev infrastructure angels.

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SOURCE Blacksmith