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What is Blacksmith?

Blacksmith Software is a GitHub Actions focused on accelerating theDeveloper Toolsa company founded in 2024 and headquartered in Silicon Valley. Founded by engineers from Cockroach Labs and Faire backgrounds, the company is dedicated to solving the slow builds, delayed feedback, and high costs that modern software teams experience with continuous integration (CI).

Blacksmith provides a high-performance hardware environment, co-address caching, and Docker layer optimizations that enable faster CI job launches, dramatically shorter build and test times, and up to ~75% compute cost savings. The platform also integrates observability and test analytics to help teams quickly locate bottlenecks, identify unstable tests, and seamlessly migrate existing GitHub Actions processes.

With low migration costs, high performance, cost advantages, and a clear value proposition, Blacksmith has demonstrated strong growth potential by attracting hundreds of customers and closing a Series A. Blacksmith Software Inc.'s funding history is as follows:

1. Seed Round: In May 2025, Blacksmith closed a $3.5 million seed round of funding. The round was led by Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator, with participation from well-known angel investors such as Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, and Rich Aberman, co-founder of WePay. The funding is mainly used to build a high-performance CI/CD cloud platform and support team expansion and technology development.
2. Series AIn September 2025, just four months later, Blacksmith closed a $10 million Series A round of financing, again led by GV. This funding reflects the investors' strong recognition of the company's growth momentum and market demand.

As of September 2025, Blacksmith's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has grown from $1.0 million in February 2025 to $3.5 million, with more than 700 customers and a team that has expanded from 4 to 11 people, demonstrating strong growth momentum.

Blacksmith's Key Products and Services

Blacksmith Software's core products focus on continuous integration (CI) acceleration and GitHub Actions optimization:

1. High Performance CI/CD Computing Platform: Blacksmith provides CI computing services based on bare metal gaming CPUs with superior single-core performance that dramatically accelerates builds, tests, and deployments.
2. Co-location Caching and Fast Docker Builds: By co-locating the cache with the job runtime environment, Blacksmith achieves 4x faster cache downloads than traditional CI and accelerates the build process with a persistent Docker layer.
3. Observability and test analysis tools: Provides comprehensive visualization of the CI pipeline, supports global log search, failed test location, and failed log feedback in PR to help developers quickly identify and resolve issues.
4. Seamless integration and cost optimization: You can switch to Blacksmith by adding a single line of code to your GitHub Actions configuration, and it costs about 75% less to run than the official GitHub runner.

Blacksmith's main user groups

• Medium to large software development team: Dozens to hundreds of engineers, multiple code repositories, a complex CI/CD pipeline, and frequent build and test tasks.
• High Frequency Iteration Project Team: High number of daily code commits, high testing and deployment needs, and the need for rapid feedback to ensure development efficiency.
• Teams using GitHub Actions: You want to build on top of your existing GitHub Actions process to speed up builds and reduce costs without having to drastically modify your existing workflow.
• Teams focused on development cost optimization: Enterprises looking to reduce compute resource overhead through high-performance hardware and cache optimization.
• Teams seeking CI observability and test quality: Engineering teams that need to locate bottlenecks, analyze failed tests, and optimize pipeline efficiency.
• Development teams built with Docker: Need to accelerate image builds and cache reuse to improve the overall efficiency of CI/CD.

The future of Blacksmith

• Continuously expanding CI/CD platform support: In addition to GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Buildkite, Jenkins and other multi-platforms may be supported in the future to increase market coverage.
• Enhanced Observability and Test Analysis: Help teams optimize CI processes and improve development efficiency through deeper pipeline analysis, flaky tests identification, and performance monitoring.
• Optimize global hardware deployment and low-latency services: Scale data center or hardware node layouts to improve build speed and reliability for users across geographies.
• Incorporating AI-driven development trends: Provides customized acceleration solutions for AI programming, automated testing, and rapid iteration scenarios to meet emerging development needs.
• Enhanced cost-effectiveness and competitive advantage: Continuously optimize hardware utilization and caching mechanisms to maintain a better price/performance ratio than traditional cloud runners, attracting medium to large engineering teams.
• Branding and Market Development: Through successful cases and investment endorsement, expanding market recognition and gaining more enterprise customers to adopt its accelerated CI/CD services.