Blacksmith secures $45m Series B as AI coding fuels software validation demand
Led by Peak XV Partners, the funding round brings total capital to $58.5m for the 2024-founded firm, which now serves over 5,000 customers in a crowded market dominated by major cloud providers.
AI code-testing startup Blacksmith has raised a $45 million Series B funding round, led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million. This marks an almost tenfold increase from the $60 million valuation assigned less than a year ago during its Series A. The round also saw participation from existing investors GV and Y Combinator, bringing the startup’s total funding to $58.5 million.
Founded in 2024, Blacksmith operates at a critical juncture in software development. While AI coding tools such as Cursor, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code have accelerated code generation, they have simultaneously created a bottleneck in testing and validation. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash noted that validating code remains a significant challenge, particularly as development teams generate larger volumes of software.
The company has seen rapid adoption, growing its customer base from over 700 to more than 5,000 in less than a year. Its client list includes Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Expensify. Revenue has grown more than tenfold over the same period, reaching tens of millions of dollars annually. Jayaprakash stated that the company achieved a $10 million annualised revenue run rate with a workforce of just 10 employees, which has since expanded to approximately 30 staff.
Blacksmith has evolved from its origins as a cloud provider for continuous integration workloads to a broader platform. It now offers Codesmith, an AI coding agent designed to automatically fix failed code checks. Some of the firm’s largest enterprise customers now spend more than $1 million a year on the platform, although Jayaprakash declined to provide a specific updated annualised revenue run rate figure.
The startup faces competition from a crowded market that includes GitHub Actions, Cursor Automations, validation capabilities within Codex and Claude Code, and AI code-testing services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Jayaprakash said Blacksmith competes on testing speed and affordability, with plans to expand into a broader suite of coding tools to help developers write, validate, and merge software more efficiently.
