Continuous Integration (CI) is supposed to streamline development—but for many teams, it’s become a bottleneck. Blacksmith, a startup out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, is tackling that problem head-on. The company announced a $10 million Series A, led by Google Ventures, to bring faster, more cost-effective, and highly observable CI to engineering teams, starting with GitHub Actions.
Speed and Cost Savings Without Compromise
Blacksmith promises to double CI speed while cutting compute costs by up to 75%. Migration is simple—just one line of code—and teams can begin shipping faster within minutes. Unlike traditional CI providers that rely on generic cloud hardware, Blacksmith runs high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs optimized for speed and predictability. This setup eliminates queuing delays and maximizes efficiency, ensuring pipelines run smoothly even under heavy workloads.
Observability Takes Center Stage
Speed and cost aren’t enough if developers can’t diagnose failures quickly. Blacksmith gives teams instant clarity by consolidating test results from parallel runs into a single searchable view. This enables engineers to differentiate real failures from flaky tests and infrastructure issues without expensive monitoring tools or manual effort. Test analytics are just the beginning—Blacksmith plans to expand observability across all aspects of GitHub Actions, historically a pain point requiring in-house tooling.
Accelerating AI-Driven Development
“Most of the time, CI just gets in the way,” said Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Co-Founder and CEO. “We built Blacksmith to remove that drag, deliver predictable speed and cost savings, and now, to give teams insight into what’s really happening inside their pipelines. This is even more critical for teams leveraging AI code generation, where iteration speed is everything.”
Since its launch, Blacksmith has grown to $1M ARR, tripling revenue in just four months. Over 800 companies—including Supabase, Mintlify, VEED, and Clerk—now run their GitHub Actions pipelines on the platform. Supabase’s API Lead Engineer, Kamil Ogórek, said, “Blacksmith cut our test times in half without us lifting more than a pull request. Feels like we’re cheating, but we’ll take it.”
Engineered by Developers Who Know the Pain
Founders Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru met at the University of Waterloo and built large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs. Their experience with slow, unpredictable CI informed Blacksmith’s approach: fast, reliable, cost-efficient, and transparent pipelines tailored for modern, AI-augmented development.
The Series A will fund expansion of engineering and go-to-market teams, offices in San Francisco and New York City, and further development of Blacksmith’s observability stack. Test analytics are just the start, with plans to address every pain point that slows developers from merging code efficiently.
Power Tomorrow’s Intelligence — Build It with TechEdgeAI
