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Blacksmith's valuation went from $60 million to $1 billion in about a year

Blacksmith's valuation went from $60 million to $1 billion in about a year — Newsmesis editorial illustration
— Newsmesis illustration

What happened

Blacksmith, a continuous integration (CI) startup, was valued at $60 million a year ago after a $10 million round. On Oct. 21 it announced a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation, two months after a $45 million Series B at $550 million. Blacksmith runs the build-and-test jobs that check code before release, and says it is growing as AI coding tools generate more code to verify. Its two reported usage figures conflict: SiliconANGLE describes 90 million code checks per week, while TechCrunch reports 90 million CI jobs run in total.

What we know

TechCrunchtechcrunch.comSiliconANGLEsiliconangle.com
  • Blacksmith raised $66 million at a $1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia, per TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE. SiliconANGLE lists Peak XV Partners, Y Combinator and GV as participants.
  • The company has raised $125 million in total. TechCrunch reports the Series B valued it at $550 million and a $10 million Series A a year ago valued it at $60 million.
  • Annual recurring revenue is up 17-fold, per both outlets. SiliconANGLE quotes CEO Aditya Jayaprakash putting revenue in the "tens of millions of dollars", with some customers spending over $1 million a year.
  • Per SiliconANGLE, more than 10,000 companies use the platform, up from about 5,000 in August, and headcount is about 40, with a target of 75 by year-end. Blacksmith owns its servers rather than renting cloud capacity, and says most of the new money will buy more of them.
  • SiliconANGLE reports Jayaprakash told Fortune the bottleneck has moved from writing code to validating it. He said CI demand rose more than 40% in a single day when Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 in July, and he described exposure to the global memory shortage as a capacity-planning problem.

What we don't know yet

  • Whether 90 million is a weekly rate (SiliconANGLE: up from about 5 million a week in early 2026) or a cumulative job count (TechCrunch). The sources conflict, and neither links the company's blog post.
  • Exact revenue. Only a range ("tens of millions of dollars") has been given, and no filing or audited figure is available.
  • Whether AI model vendors will build code validation themselves and compete with Blacksmith. SiliconANGLE flags this as a risk; no vendor has announced such a product in these sources.
  • Customer names differ between outlets (SiliconANGLE: LangChain, Supabase, Granola; TechCrunch: Mercury, Granola). The lists may be partial rather than contradictory.

Why it matters

Sequoia and other investors are paying a 17x step-up in valuation over about a year for infrastructure that checks AI-written code. Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which host most in-house CI today, face a specialist that owns its own hardware.

Claims

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Why you can trust this story

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How this credibility score is calculated

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Atom-verified claims matched cited source text. Weights are fixed and explainable.

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Verification ledger · 7

  • Claim: Blacksmith raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation.
    Status: ConfirmedVerification trailVerifiedChecked by verification engine

    At least one extracted atom matched cited source full text.

  • Claim: Blacksmith's Series B of $45 million, raised two months earlier, valued the company at $550 million.
    Status: ConfirmedVerification trailVerifiedChecked by verification engine

    At least one extracted atom matched cited source full text.

  • Claim: Blacksmith has raised $125 million in total.
    Status: ConfirmedVerification trailVerifiedChecked by verification engine

    At least one extracted atom matched cited source full text.

  • Claim: Blacksmith says its annual recurring revenue has grown 17-fold.
    Status: ConfirmedVerification trailVerifiedChecked by verification engine

    At least one extracted atom matched cited source full text.

  • Claim: Blacksmith says more than 10,000 companies now use its platform, up from about 5,000 in August.
    Status: UnconfirmedVerification trailUnverifiedChecked by verification engine

    No atom-level source-text verification is available.

  • Claim: Blacksmith's 90 million code checks are a weekly rate, as SiliconANGLE describes them.
    Status: UnconfirmedVerification trailUnverifiedChecked by verification engine

    No atom-level source-text verification is available.

  • Claim: Blacksmith's CI workload rose more than 40% in one day when Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 in July, per the CEO.
    Status: UnconfirmedVerification trailUnverifiedChecked by verification engine

    No atom-level source-text verification is available.

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