Blacksmith Funding: Raises $66 Million Series C at Unicorn Valuation Led by Sequoia Capital
- Blacksmith has raised $66 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, with Sequoia Capital leading the round.
- Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator participated, taking Blacksmith’s total funding to about $125 million.
- The company will expand its compute infrastructure and engineering team, with its nearly 10 MW footprint targeted to grow fivefold in 2027.
San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup Blacksmith has raised $66 million in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $1 billion.
The round also saw participation from Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator. The latest fundraise brings Blacksmith’s total funding to approximately $125 million.
The funding comes around two months after Blacksmith announced its $45 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation. The company has clarified that the Series B was actually raised in March 2026 and announced publicly in August.
Blacksmith plans to use the new capital to expand its computing infrastructure and grow its engineering team. The company currently manages just under 10 megawatts (MW) of compute capacity across data centres in the United States and Europe and plans to increase that footprint fivefold in 2027.
Blacksmith Builds Infrastructure for AI-Driven Software Testing
Founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith provides infrastructure for continuous integration (CI), the process through which software code is automatically built and tested before changes are merged and deployed.
The startup was founded around the premise that as AI coding tools allow developers to generate software faster, the infrastructure required to validate that code can become a bottleneck. Every code change still needs to be built, tested and checked before it can be merged, increasing the volume of CI workloads as development activity accelerates.
Blacksmith operates a cloud platform specifically designed for these workloads. Instead of requiring engineering teams to provision and maintain their own CI infrastructure on general-purpose cloud platforms, Blacksmith says its infrastructure can absorb large fluctuations in demand and automatically scale computing resources as workloads change.
The company says more than 10,000 companies now use its platform, including Mercury, Granola, Handshake and LangChain. That customer count has increased from more than 6,000 when Blacksmith announced its Series B in August.
Blacksmith says the number of CI jobs processed on its platform each week has grown from around 5 million in January 2026 to more than 90 million currently. Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has also grown 17-fold over the same period, according to the company.
The startup says its infrastructure allows customers to run CI jobs twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average compared with alternative setups. These are company-reported performance claims and have not been independently audited in the funding announcement.
Blacksmith has also expanded beyond infrastructure for CI workloads. Earlier in 2026, it launched [code]smith, a cloud coding agent that can build features and fix bugs while working within the software validation process. The company says the tool can diagnose CI failures, automatically fix them and help keep pull requests ready to merge.
Funding to Expand Compute Capacity
The latest funding will allow Blacksmith to expand the computing infrastructure needed to handle growing software testing workloads and increase its engineering team. Its current compute footprint is spread across data centres in the US and Europe, with the company targeting a fivefold increase in capacity during 2027.
The company’s latest growth is closely linked to the adoption of AI coding agents. Blacksmith says CI jobs on its platform have been increasing by 5–10% week over week since the beginning of 2026, as developers use tools such as Claude Code and other AI coding systems to produce more software and pull requests.
The company is positioning CI as part of a broader software validation layer for AI-assisted development. Its objective is not only to provide computing resources for automated tests but also to help developers identify and resolve failures before code is merged.
Blacksmith’s valuation has increased rapidly over the past year. The company was valued at $60 million when it raised a $10 million Series A in 2025, followed by the $550 million valuation attached to its $45 million Series B and now the $1 billion valuation in the latest Series C.