GTM & Ops Recruiter

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/).

Blacksmith raised $45M Series B funding for faster code validation. Blacksmith, a cloud for validating code through drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners, raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, with existing investors Y Combinator and GV also participating. The round values Blacksmith at $550 million. Blacksmith claims that its runners for GitHub Actions are 2x faster and costs 75% less than GitHub-hosted runners. GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. You can create workflows that build and test every pull request to your repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. If Blacksmith started with purpose-built infrastructure that runs CI workloads dramatically faster, the company recently launched codesmith, a cloud coding agent developers can delegate tasks to. Beyond building features and fixing bugs, codesmith works inside the validation loop: diagnosing CI failures, autofixing them, and keeping pull requests green. It is also the foundation for codesmith QA, which will autonomously test changes before they merge.