Blacksmith Series B raises $45 mn led by Peak XV at $550 mn valuation. By Tanu August 17, 2026 4 Mins Read Blacksmith Series B has raised $45 million in fresh funding led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the San Francisco-based AI developer infrastructure startup at around $550 million. Existing backers Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator also participated in the round. The financing was completed in March 2026 but has been disclosed only now. With the latest investment, Blacksmith's total funding has reached approximately $58.5 million. The company plans to use a substantial share of the new capital to expand its computing capacity as demand rises for infrastructure that can test, validate and ship software generated with the help of artificial intelligence. Blacksmith targets rising AI code testing demand. Blacksmith operates in the continuous integration (CI) segment, helping engineering teams automatically build and test software before it moves further through the development process. The company was founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aditya Maru and Aayush Shah. Its business has increasingly shifted toward supporting development workflows in which AI systems themselves generate and modify code. As AI coding tools become more capable, developers can produce software changes at a much faster pace. That increases the amount of code that needs to be tested and reviewed before deployment, creating additional pressure on existing CI infrastructure. Blacksmith said the number of CI jobs processed through its platform has been increasing by roughly 5% to 10% week-on-week since the beginning of 2026. The startup now serves more than 6,000 companies, with customers including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Mercury. Fresh capital to expand computing infrastructure. A major priority for the Blacksmith Series B proceeds will be increasing the company's computing footprint. Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of CPU cores and intends to expand that capacity by roughly 10 times in the coming months. The investment comes as the company prepares for a much larger volume of software testing workloads generated by AI-assisted development. Blacksmith argues that conventional CI infrastructure could face capacity and performance constraints as AI coding agents generate more pull requests and software changes. The company is therefore building infrastructure specifically designed around the speed and scale required by modern software development teams. Startup expands beyond traditional CI workflows. Blacksmith has also broadened its product offering beyond automated testing. Its recently introduced Code Smith is a cloud-based coding agent designed to work on software development tasks, including building features, fixing bugs and investigating CI failures. The company is also developing CodeSmith Quality Assurance, which is intended to automatically test code changes before they are merged. The broader strategy is to make the development cycle more automated, allowing both human developers and AI agents to move from writing code to validation and deployment more quickly. Blacksmith has positioned its infrastructure against established developer platforms such as GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Buildkite, Depot and Namespace. The startup claims its purpose-built CI cloud can execute workloads up to twice as quickly and reduce costs by 50% to 75% compared with GitHub-hosted runners. Blacksmith's own engineering updates also highlight the growing pressure AI-generated code is placing on continuous integration systems. Blacksmith's engineering blog Peak XV deepens US AI investment push. The Blacksmith Series B investment also highlights Peak XV Partners' expanding focus on US-based technology startups. The venture capital firm has been building its presence in the US since becoming an independent firm following the 2023 separation from Sequoia Capital. Its US portfolio includes AI and developer-focused companies such as Vapi, Mem0, Hyperbound and PostHog. Peak XV's official portfolio also lists Blacksmith among its investments, reflecting the firm's broader interest in developer infrastructure and AI-focused businesses. In February 2026, Peak XV announced $1.3 billion in new capital commitments across its India Seed, India Venture and APAC funds, underlining its continued investment activity across technology markets. The Blacksmith investment comes as AI increasingly changes the economics and workflow of software development. For the startup, the next phase will centre on scaling its infrastructure while expanding tools that allow AI-generated code to be tested and merged with less manual intervention. For more business and startup funding updates, readers can also explore [Lenskart Q1 FY27 results](https://businessmatters.in/lenskart-q1-fy27-results/) and [IndiQube Q1 FY27 results](https://businessmatters.in/indiqube-q1-fy27-results/).

AutoGrab appoints Ken Thompson as Chief Product Officer. MEDIA RELEASE 25 June 2026 AutoGrab, the Melbourne-founded automotive data intelligence platform, has appointed Ken Thompson as Chief Product Officer. Thompson joins from software delivery company Buildkite, where as SVP, Head of Product he led the platform used by Uber, OpenAI and Slack. Ken was previously Chief Product Officer at Stax, part of the Versent Group acquired by Telstra for $267.5 million, and has held senior product roles at Microsoft. The appointment comes as AutoGrab scales from Australian market leader to global platform. In January the company completed an $80 million Series B raise, valuing it at $230 million, and is expanding across the UK and Europe. Ken will lead AutoGrab's global product strategy across dealers, insurers, lenders, marketplaces and enterprise partners. "Ken has spent fifteen years building SaaS products that scale internationally, most recently at Buildkite and Stax," said Daniel Werzberger, CEO of AutoGrab. "That is exactly the experience we need as we take our platform into new markets while continuing to invest heavily at home in Australia." "Dealers, insurers, lenders and fleets act on our data every day," he said. "Ken knows how to build products they trust, and how to put AI to work where it changes the result rather than the marketing." Ken Thompson said the depth of AutoGrab's platform set the opportunity apart. "AutoGrab answers the three questions behind every automotive transaction: what a vehicle is, what it is worth now, and where that value is heading," he said. "Few companies own data of that depth across this many markets." "I'm joining as the platform goes global," Ken added. "My job is to turn that rich automotive intelligence into products that don't just deliver insight but automate the decisions dealers, insurers and lenders make every day, so our customers, and AutoGrab, win together." About AutoGrab AutoGrab is the automotive data intelligence platform serving dealerships, insurers, financial institutions, fleet operators and marketplaces across Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Malaysia. Founded in Melbourne in 2020, the company provides vehicle identification, valuation and market intelligence through proprietary technology and exclusive data partnerships. More than 1,000 dealerships and over 90% of Australian motor insurers use AutoGrab data. The company is headquartered in Melbourne with offices in London. For further information please contact:

Buildkite has named James Wilson as Chief Technology Officer.