Blacksmith Secures $3.5M to Develop High-Performance CI Cloud

Blacksmith has raised $3.5 million in seed funding, led by GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, as announced in a press release. The funding round also saw participation from notable angel investors, including Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis of Cockroach Labs, and Rich Aberman of WePay by J.P. Morgan.

Blacksmith aims to address the limitations of existing continuous integration (CI) platforms, which often become bottlenecks in AI-driven development workflows. The company is developing a high-performance CI cloud that is not merely a wrapper for existing platforms like AWS or GitHub, but a unique hardware-software stack optimized specifically for CI tasks.

The platform is already in use by over 600 organizations, including Ashby, Veed, Finch, Pylon, and Plex, helping them achieve significant growth. Founded in 2024 by former engineers from Cockroach Labs, Blacksmith is based in San Francisco and focuses on providing best-in-class compute, storage, observability, and security for CI workloads in an AI-centric world.