Blacksmith Raises $10M Series A to Speed Code Shipping

Blacksmith closed a speedy $10 million Series A led by Google Ventures just four months after its seed round, signaling investor confidence in a startup racing to shorten the time between code written and code shipped.

Fast traction, fast funding

Investors doubled down on results rather than just promise. Since launching in January 2024, Blacksmith grew from $1 million ARR with a four-person team to $3.5 million ARR and over 700 customers, now supported by an eight-person staff. The Series A closed in 14 days, a sign that backers view the company as executing at pace.

What they sell and how it’s different

Blacksmith offers a CI/CD platform that complements GitHub Actions but swaps generic cloud VMs for high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs running on bare metal. The result: up to 2x build and test speed and compute cost reductions the company says can reach 75%.

Customers can flip over by changing a single line of config, meaning teams start shipping faster within minutes. For compute-intensive engineering shops — think infra, databases, and large-scale services — that marginal switch can translate into big savings and faster iteration cycles.

Why timing matters

The rise of AI coding agents has accelerated commit frequency and automated test workloads, expanding the addressable market for faster, cheaper CI. Blacksmith’s founders — veterans from Cockroach Labs and Faire — built the product for teams that hit the limits of cloud VM economics and need predictability at scale.

Target customers are large engineering organizations (roughly 500+ engineers). Early adopters include Supabase, VEED, Mintlify and others that run GitHub Actions through Blacksmith to get faster builds and richer test analytics.

Business implications

For engineering leaders, the promise is straightforward: faster CI means quicker feedback loops, fewer context switches for developers, and higher deployment velocity. For finance teams, shifting to bare-metal economics can shrink cloud bills and improve margin predictability as test and build workloads scale.

Blacksmith’s approach isn’t a one-size-fits-all replacement for hyperscalers; the team frames bare metal as a strategic choice for compute-heavy infra where control over cost and performance matters most.

What to watch next

Expect investors and competitors to pay close attention to how well Blacksmith scales margins as it adds customers, and whether its pricing and analytics can win over more large engineering orgs. The company’s quick ARR growth and high-profile backers — including GV, Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball, and YC roots — give it runway to expand the platform and observability features.

In a world where speed equals competitive advantage, tools that shave hours off build and test cycles can change release rhythms across product organizations. Blacksmith’s bet is that compute-optimized CI will be a core lever for companies pushing rapid innovation.

How leaders can respond

Engineering and infrastructure leaders should benchmark current CI costs and build times, pilot high-performance runs for the heaviest pipelines, and evaluate whether bare-metal or hybrid CI reduces total cost of ownership. Observability into flaky tests and test-suite bottlenecks will be critical to realize the full speed gains.

QuarkyByte monitors this space closely and helps organizations translate CI improvements into measurable business outcomes — from reduced cycle time to lower cloud spend and higher developer productivity.