Blacksmith, a startup focused on software validation, has raised a $45 million Series B round, bringing its valuation to $550 million. The funding, led by Peak XV Partners, marks a 10x increase from its previous $60 million valuation. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, pushing the company’s total funding to $58.5 million. Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test, and verify software before it reaches production. The startup now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify, up from over 700 customers less than a year ago, according to co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash.
The rise of AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code has made it easier for software teams to generate code, but the quality of AI-generated code remains inconsistent. Jayaprakash said validating code is still a bottleneck, especially as more code is being written. Blacksmith began as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads, helping companies run software builds and tests. The startup has since expanded with Codesmith, an AI coding agent that can automatically fix failed code checks. Jayaprakash noted Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees and has since grown its workforce to about 30, with revenue reaching 'tens of millions of dollars.'
Blacksmith operates in a competitive market with key competitors including GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation capabilities in Codex and Claude Code, and AI code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Jayaprakash said the startup is competing on testing speed and affordability. Looking ahead, Blacksmith plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools to help developers write, validate, and merge software faster.
Source: techcrunch
