Google Ventures doubles down on dev tool startup Blacksmith with $10M Series A just months after seed, as the company accelerates CI/CD with high-performance, cost-efficient bare-metal infrastructure and hits $3.5M ARR.

Google Ventures has doubled down on Blacksmith, a developer tool startup, by leading a $10 million Series A round just four months after its $3.5 million seed funding. The rapid follow-on investment underscores growing confidence in the company’s ability to solve critical bottlenecks in modern software development. The Series A closed in just 14 days, driven by strong early traction and the rising demand for faster, more efficient CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) solutions in the age of AI-driven coding. Google Ventures, which first backed Blacksmith in May, was convinced by the company’s rapid growth and technical differentiation. Blacksmith, based in San Francisco, offers a high-performance CI/CD platform designed to accelerate how developers ship code. It acts as a complementary layer to GitHub Actions, helping teams test and deploy software faster and more reliably. Since its founding in January 2024, the company has grown from a team of four to 11 employees and scaled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from $1 million in February to $3.5 million — with over 700 customers. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company’s success stems from real-world experience. He and his co-founders, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, previously worked at Faire and Cockroach Labs, where they encountered the inefficiencies of traditional CI pipelines. Testing new code often required spinning up hundreds of machines and consuming massive computing resources, leading to delays and unpredictable costs. Blacksmith’s solution runs on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs hosted in its own data centers — a bare-metal approach that avoids reliance on generic cloud infrastructure from providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. This allows Blacksmith to deliver up to double the processing speed and reduce compute costs by as much as 75% compared to standard cloud-based CI tools. “Because we’re going the bare-metal route, we have much better control over our economics compared to the hyperscalers,” Jayaprakash said. “If you’re a compute-heavy company, like us, it makes sense. It gives us abundant control over our margins.” The platform also provides advanced test analytics and an observability roadmap, offering developers deeper visibility into their GitHub Actions workflows. Blacksmith targets larger engineering teams — typically 500 engineers or more — and already counts companies like Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED among its customers. The funding round included participation from existing investors and notable angels, including Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry. Blacksmith launched out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and is now focused on doubling its ARR by the end of the year.