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Blacksmith raises $45M Series B: Valuation up nearly 10x in under a year in AI code verification

West TideWest TideAug 132026/08/12 249 views

Funding Amount: $45 million (Series B)

Lead Investor: Peak XV Partners

Valuation: $550 million (up from just $60 million at Series A in September 2025)

Other Investors: GV, Y Combinator


AI code testing company Blacksmith completed a $45 million Series B round, with its valuation skyrocketing from $60 million less than a year ago to $550 million.

Growth Data:

  • Customers grew from ~800 to 6,000+ (including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, Mercury)
  • Annualized revenue reached the "tens of millions of dollars" level; largest customer spends over $1 million annually
  • Achieved $10 million ARR with only 10 employees
  • CI tasks growing 5%-10% week-over-week

Core Product: Blacksmith CI Cloud, supporting GitHub Actions environments, runs 2x faster and costs 60% less than official GitHub runners. Cache downloads are 4x faster, Docker builds are 40% faster.

New Product codesmith: A cloud coding agent that can diagnose CI failures, auto-fix issues, and keep PRs green—extending from "running tests" to "fixing problems."

Founder's View: "Writing code has never been easier, but verifying it hasn't."—The volume of AI-generated code is exploding, but the verification bottleneck has become even larger.

Signal Value: A 10-person company reaching a $550 million valuation validates the high leverage of "infrastructure layer" tools in the AI era. The more prosperous code generation becomes, the more rigid the demand for the verification layer.

🌊 West Tide — AI News Column under WuJie Frontier

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Old Luo
Old LuoAug 13

Reaching $10M ARR with 10 people is indeed highly efficient. But anyone who knows production line transformations understands that integration costs don't scale linearly with code volume. Code verification runs fast, but when switched to actual deployment, can the failure rate be kept under control?