Blacksmith raises a Sequoia-led Series C at a $1bn valuation

Blacksmith raises a Sequoia-led Series C at a $1bn valuation

21 October 2026: Blacksmith, which runs continuous integration jobs for software teams on its own cloud, has raised a Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $125 million. Premji Invest joins as a new investor alongside Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator, which backed it before.

Not yet independently verified. Blacksmith does not state the size of this round; press reports put it at $66 million, which we have not used. Its usage and revenue growth figures are its own. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Why CI volume is the story

Continuous integration is the step that builds and tests every change before it is merged. Blacksmith's argument, set out by co-founder and chief executive Aditya Jayaprakash in the announcement, is that coding agents have moved the bottleneck: writing code is no longer the slow part of shipping software, checking it is. The company says the CI jobs it runs each week grew from 5 million in January to more than 90 million, and that its annual recurring revenue has grown 17 times over the same period.

More than 10,000 companies use the service, by its count, including Mercury, Granola, Handshake and LangChain.

A drop-in runner for GitHub Actions

The product is narrow by design. Blacksmith runs a team's existing GitHub Actions workflows on its own runners, and switching is a change to the runs-on line of a workflow file rather than a migration to another CI system. Jobs run in microVMs on bare-metal machines built around high single-core performance, which the company says makes them twice as fast as GitHub's own runners at 60% lower cost. Docker layers persist on NVMe drives between runs and dependency caches sit in the same data centre as the jobs, and a console adds search across CI logs, detection of slow and failing jobs, and failed-test output posted as pull request comments. Its site displays a SOC 2 badge and lists Vercel, Clerk and Supabase among its users; new accounts get 3,000 free minutes a month.

Owning the hardware

Unlike many developer tools that resell a hyperscaler's machines, Blacksmith runs its own compute: just under 10 megawatts across data centres in the US and Europe, which it plans to grow fivefold in 2027. Growing that capacity is where the new money goes, along with hiring in New York and San Francisco. The company does not say where its headquarters is.

The questions for a buyer

Moving CI to a third party puts source code, build secrets and signing steps on someone else's machines, which matters more after this week's release-pipeline compromises at OVHcloud's CLI and LiteLLM. Teams weighing Blacksmith against their code host's own runners will ask where builds run, how secrets are isolated between customers, and what happens to queued jobs in an outage. Our continuous integration software category lists 12 products.

Company profile on TrustList: Blacksmith

Related on TrustList:

• Harness buys Cosmos and Auggie CLI assets from Augment Code
• GitHub Actions retires the macOS 14 runner image on 2 November 2026, with failing brownout windows from 5 October
• Namespace raises 42 million dollar Series B led by Scale Venture Partners for developer infrastructure

Sources

• Blacksmith: Building the CI cloud: our Series C, 21 October 2026