AI code-testing startup Blacksmith raises $45M at $550M valuation

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Blacksmith, a startup that helps software teams test and validate code before it ships, closed a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners that values the company at $550 million - nearly 10 times the $60 million valuation it received at its $10 million Series A less than a year ago. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing Blacksmith’s total funding to $58.5 million.

Founded in 2024, the startup originally operated as a cloud provider for continuous integration (CI) workloads, running the builds and automated tests that catch problems before code reaches production. It has since expanded the platform with Codesmith, an AI agent that can automatically fix failed code checks.

Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash told TechCrunch that the customer base grew from more than 700 to more than 5,000 in under a year, with named customers including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. Some of the largest accounts now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform. The company hit a $10 million annualized revenue run rate with just 10 employees; headcount has since grown to around 30, and revenue has reached what Jayaprakash described as “tens of millions of dollars,” though he declined to give a precise updated figure.

The pitch rests on a tension that has grown sharper as AI coding tools have proliferated.

“Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it’s an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more.”- Aditya Jayaprakash, co-founder and CEO, Blacksmith

Blacksmith is competing against large, entrenched players - GitHub Actions, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all offer overlapping capabilities - as well as validation features built directly into tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code. Jayaprakash said Blacksmith differentiates on testing speed and affordability, and plans to expand into a broader suite covering writing, validating, and merging code.

Practitioner takeaway: If your team is shipping more code with AI assistants but spending more time on failed CI runs or manual review cycles, the market is clearly moving toward dedicated validation tooling. Blacksmith’s rapid customer growth suggests teams are already paying for faster, cheaper test infrastructure rather than relying solely on what’s bundled into their existing coding tools - worth evaluating before the category consolidates further.

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