Sequoia-Backed Blacksmith Hits $1 Billion Valuation With $66 Million Raise

AI code-testing infrastructure startup Blacksmith has raised $66 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation, the company announced.

Premji Invest joined the round, along with existing backers Peak XV Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Y Combinator. The new cash brings Blacksmith's total funding to roughly $125 million since its 2024 founding.

The pace of this company's ascent is the real story here. Blacksmith closed a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation in March 2026, announced only in August. In under a year, the startup has nearly doubled its price tag.

What's driving the growth?

Blacksmith builds infrastructure for continuous integration (CI) — the automated checks that run on code changes before they're merged into an existing codebase. The company's founders, Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, launched the business in 2024 after meeting at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Shah and Maru previously engineered at Cockroach Labs; Jayaprakash worked at Faire.

Their thesis is straightforward: AI coding agents have accelerated software development so much that the plumbing underneath it is buckling.

Jayaprakash, Blacksmith's co-founder and CEO, said developers who previously submitted three or four pull requests a day are now producing substantially more. He said engineering teams are finding that "their CI infrastructure can't keep up" with the growing volume of code.

The numbers back him up. Blacksmith said weekly CI jobs on its platform jumped from five million in January 2026 to more than 90 million — an 18-fold increase in under a year. Annual recurring revenue grew 17-fold over the same period, according to the startup.

What does this change for engineering teams?

For practitioners, the pitch is speed and cost. Blacksmith claims its platform completes CI jobs twice as fast at 60% lower cost on average, while sparing customers the work of managing and scaling their own compute.

One customer put a concrete figure on it. LangChain infrastructure engineer Joaquin Borggio said Blacksmith reduced the burden of managing the company's CI systems while "cutting our runner costs by roughly 40%." He added that those savings don't even count the engineering time freed up.

More than 10,000 companies now use the platform, including Ashby, Granola and Handshake alongside LangChain.

The company will spend the fresh capital on team expansion and computing infrastructure. Blacksmith currently manages nearly 10 megawatts of capacity across data centers in the United States and Europe, and it plans to grow that footprint at least fivefold in 2027 — a jump to roughly 50 megawatts or more.

Why Sequoia wrote the check

Isaiah Boone, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said Blacksmith recognized early that AI-generated code would force changes to software testing infrastructure. He cited the founding team's "deep systems expertise and speed of execution" as factors behind the investment.

That framing matters for anyone watching the DevTools market. The rise of AI-generated code shifts value toward the systems that test and validate software before release — every automated agent writing code needs something to catch its mistakes, and at machine-generated volume.

Blacksmith's bet, now backed by a billion-dollar valuation, is that CI becomes one of the chokepoints of the AI coding era. If weekly job volumes keep compounding anywhere near their 2026 trajectory, the planned fivefold capacity expansion may be the floor, not the ceiling.