Google's back-to-back capital injections! 11-member AI programming startup Blacksmith secures $71 million in funding, accelerates developer ecosystem layout

AI Programming Toolsdeveloper (of real estate, a commercial product etc)BlacksmithAnnounces Closing of $10 Million (Approx. Rs. 71 Million) Series Afinancing, this round by Google Ventures (Google Ventures, or GV) in May this year, Google Ventures also participated in the company's seed round of financing.

The investors also include Spencer Kimball, CEO of distributed database company Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry, a US-based application performance monitoring unicorn.

According to the Blacksmith blog, this round is a "results-oriented" raise, as the company continues to expand its high-performance CI/CD (a set of processes that automate the building, testing, and deployment of software) cloud service for GitHub Actions.

Founded in January 2024, Blacksmith's core product is a CI/CD platform that is an alternative to GitHub Actions (an automated tool that helps developers define, build, and execute work in code repositories), with the core highlights beingrunning on bare metal servers with high-performance gaming-grade CPUs.Switching from an existing workflow can be done with one line of configuration. The platform claims to speed up software CI/CD by up to about 2x, cache downloads by up to 4x, Docker builds by up to 40x, and reduces the cost of computing power by up to 75% in some scenarios.

Blacksmith is led by Aditya Jayaprakash, with a core founding team from the University of Waterloo, all of whom have worked on large-scale systems development at distributed database company Cockroach Labs and e-commerce platform Faire. Notably, the team began the year with just four people and has now expanded to 11.

▲Founder Team

According to Blacksmith's disclosure, its target customer base is 500+ R&D teams. Since raising $3.5 million in a seed round in May, Blacksmith's customer sizeExceeds 700, covering Ashby (hiring ATS, doubling deployment frequency, and dropping arithmetic costs by ~751 TP4T), vector DB creator Chroma (~2x faster testing, and dropping CI costs by ~501 TP4T), and more.

business growth.The company's annualized recurring revenue (ARR) has increased to $3.5 million (Rs. 24.88 million) from $1 million (Rs. 7.1 million) in February, an increase of 2,501 TP4 T. Based on the current trend, Blacksmith plans to double it to $7 million (Rs. 49.75 million) by the end of 2025.

In addition to CI/CD acceleration, Blacksmith provides test analysis and observability features to help developers identify performance bottlenecks. The founding team reveals that while the traditional CI phase consumes hundreds of machines and a large amount of arithmetic costs, Blacksmith controls the cost structure through its own hardware, thus optimizing gross margins and increasing the room for scaling.

▲Trial Screenshot

Conclusion: Cloud giants are aggressively laying out next-generation developer ecosystems

With the accurate capture of developers' needs, this team of only 11 people was able to serve 700 clients and double ARR in a short period of time.

Google Ventures' strategic intentions also go far beyond financial returns, with two consecutive rounds of bets in four months.Cloud giants are actively laying out the underlying pillars of the next-generation developer ecosystem. It can be seen that in the era of AI-driven software development, speed is becoming the new productivity.

Source: TechCrunch