May 2, 2025
US DevInfra Startup Blacksmith Raises $3.5M Seed Round to Build High-Performance CI Infrastructure
San Francisco, United States —
Blacksmith, a developer infrastructure startup, has raised $3.5M USD in a Seed funding round dated May 1, 2025. The round was led by Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator, with participation from renowned angel investors including Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Richard Aberman, JJ Fliegelman, Eli Brown, and Theo Browne. The company, founded in January 2024, is building a next-generation Continuous Integration (CI) cloud to help businesses run CI pipelines twice as fast at half the cost, and plans to use the funds to expand its infrastructure and engineering team.
About Blacksmith
Founded by a team of former engineers from Cockroach Labs, Faire, and Superblocks, Blacksmith has developed a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners that offers significantly faster build times and reduced compute costs. By leveraging consumer-grade gaming CPUs, the company has built a purpose-built CI cloud that optimizes for speed, observability, and scalability, addressing one of the biggest productivity bottlenecks in modern software development. Blacksmith’s CI solution is already used by over 600 companies, including Ashby, Finch, Clerk, Veed, and Mintlify.
Purpose of financing
The newly raised capital will be used to scale up the company’s bare-metal hardware infrastructure, continue building out its proprietary hardware-software stack, and grow the team. The founders aim to further develop the observability and security layers of their platform, ultimately creating a CI experience optimized for performance and developer velocity. The company is currently hiring across engineering and product roles.
Founder’s Insights
Aayush, Co-founder of Blacksmith, said:
“Our vision is to rethink CI from first principles”. “We realized companies were being held back by the limitations of traditional hyperscalers like AWS and GCP for running CI workloads. By building our own compute layer with gaming CPUs and tightly integrating it with CI tooling, we can offer unparalleled speed, reliability, and cost-efficiency.”
Aditya Jayaprakash, Co-founder of Blacksmith, added:
“We’ve experienced the pain of slow CI firsthand. Every minute of delay impacts developer productivity and revenue. With this funding, we’re investing in creating the fastest, most reliable CI infrastructure in the world.”
Conclusion
Blacksmith sees a significant opportunity ahead as demand for CI infrastructure continues to rise—driven by the growth of AI-assisted code generation and the increasing complexity of software systems. With this funding, the company is well-positioned to capitalize on this momentum and set a new standard for CI performance.
For updates, visit Blacksmith on LinkedIn.