Blacksmith raises $45M Series B, valuation soars to $550M
Original: AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year
Why This Matters
The rapid valuation jump signals strong investor conviction in software validation as a critical layer in the AI coding stack.
AI code-testing startup Blacksmith raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550M — nearly 10x its $60M Series A valuation from less than a year ago. The round brings total funding to $58.5M, with GV and Y Combinator also participating.
Founded in 2024, Blacksmith builds software testing and validation infrastructure designed to keep pace with the surge in AI-generated code. The startup originally focused on cloud-based continuous integration (CI) workloads and has since expanded its platform with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that automatically fixes failed code checks.
CEO Aditya Jayaprakash told TechCrunch the company now serves more than 5,000 customers — including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify — up from 700 customers less than a year ago. Some of its largest customers spend over $1 million annually on the platform. The company hit a $10M annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since grown to roughly 30 employees with revenue now in the "tens of millions of dollars."
Jayaprakash cited the proliferation of AI coding tools like Cursor, OpenAI Codex, and Anthropic Claude Code as a key tailwind: "Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it's an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more." Blacksmith competes on speed and affordability against rivals including GitHub Actions, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AI-native coding platforms.