Blacksmith secures $45m to expand AI-assisted code validation

Blacksmith has raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, reaching a valuation of $550 million. The AI code-testing startup was valued at $60 million when it raised a $10 million Series A less than a year ago. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also joined the new round, taking Blacksmith’s total funding to $58.5 million.

Founded in 2024, Blacksmith helps companies build, test and verify software before it reaches production. Co-founder and chief executive Aditya Jayaprakash said the company now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Expensify. That compares with more than 700 customers less than a year ago.

Testing capacity becomes more important as code generation accelerates

Tools including Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code have made it significantly easier for development teams to generate code. Jayaprakash said the quality of AI-generated code is not guaranteed, however, and that validating code remains a bottleneck as teams produce more of it.

Blacksmith began as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads. Its platform runs the builds and tests used to validate code before production. The company has broadened the offering with Codesmith, an AI coding agent designed to automatically fix failed code checks.

The funding comes amid a wider push to build enterprise AI-agent infrastructure, including enterprise AI agents without frontier-lab dependence, where the focus is on business deployment without reliance on frontier labs. For Blacksmith, the immediate product emphasis remains software delivery: helping developers write, validate and merge software faster.

Growth and a competitive software delivery market

Jayaprakash said Blacksmith reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with 10 employees. The company has since grown to about 30 employees and revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, although he did not provide a more specific ARR figure. Some of its largest customers spend more than $1 million annually on the platform.

Blacksmith operates in a crowded market. Its competitors include GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation features embedded in Codex and Claude Code, other startups, and AI code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Jayaprakash said Blacksmith competes on test speed and affordability.

For businesses adopting AI-assisted development, the practical implication is that faster code generation increases the need to assess build, test and remediation workflows before changes are merged into production.